Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBAwas a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. He was an essayist, conversationalist, raconteur, and lecturer. In its obituary of the scholar, the Independent stated that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 June 1909
CountryRussian Federation
Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow - despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.
There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision... and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory... The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.
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.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made
True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
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.
The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.
The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.
One must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.