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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

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Isaiah Berlin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1909
Born: June 6
Died: 1997
Died: November 5
Diplomat
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Historian Of Ideas
Philosopher
University Teacher
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Sir Isaiah Berlin
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More quotes by Isaiah Berlin

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Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end.
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We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.
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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.
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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.
Isaiah Berlin
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The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
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But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
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All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
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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.
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True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.
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Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
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The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.
Isaiah Berlin
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Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
Isaiah Berlin
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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.
Isaiah Berlin
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Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
Isaiah Berlin
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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 variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
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The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
Isaiah Berlin
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Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
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Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
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One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations... or emancipation of a nation or race or class... this is the belief that somewhere... there is a final solution.
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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