Quotes by Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

Berlin

Matter

Spring

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Denial

Ignorance

Men

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 gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

Goal

Powerful

Rights

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday… skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side… in the great ideological wars of our time.

Tyrants

War

Yesterday

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

Berlin

Ideas

Way

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do – and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.

Church

Mad

Wicked

I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object…I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

Animal

Goal

Men

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it – as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

Believe

Confused

Men

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

Lambs

Liberty

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Fairness And Equality

Justice

Liberty

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Adults

Animal

Asking

Assumption

Believe

Berlin

Care

Chains

Childhood

Choices

Church

Class

Confused

Curiosity

Defense

Denial

Desire

Fairness And Equality

Fundamentals

Goal

Guarantees That

Guides

Habit

Hate

Honesty

Hopeful

Horizon

Human Nature

Humanity

Ideas

Ignorance

Ingredients

Inspiration

Intellectual

Interesting

Justice

Lambs

Law

Liberty

Looks

Loss

Mad

Made

Matter

May

Men

Metaphor

Past

Patterns

People

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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Quotes by Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

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 gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday… skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side… in the great ideological wars of our time.

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

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

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