Isaiah Berlin Short Quotes

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Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

Isaiah Berlin
We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

Isaiah Berlin
True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

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

Isaiah Berlin
Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

Isaiah Berlin
Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.

Isaiah Berlin
Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Isaiah Berlin
The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been the markof high civilisation both on the part of individuals and communities.

Isaiah Berlin
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

Isaiah Berlin
Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.

Isaiah Berlin
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.

Isaiah Berlin
Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Isaiah Berlin
Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Isaiah Berlin
No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Isaiah Berlin
The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

Isaiah Berlin