Quotes by Isaiah Berlin

“Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not...”

“The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of chur...”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and...”

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifte...”

“Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longin...”

“Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the power or mental activity assumed by nave historians; indeed he was, in K...”

“What is Life?(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)(3) Mrs Wo...”

“I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.”

“This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of a...”

“Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.”

“Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast varie...”

“The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.”

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, thin...”

“To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men.”

“Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.”

“Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.”

“Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas — ideas and their ...”

“What is Life?”