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Isaiah Berlin Biography

Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBA (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. Although averse to writing, his improvised lectures and talks were recorded and transcribed, with his spoken word being converted by his secretaries into his published essays and books.

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Isaiah Berlin Quotes

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

Berlin, Central, Matter, Personal, Spring

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.

Chains, Fundamental, Fundamentals, Metaphor, Rest

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

Death, Lambs, Liberty, Wolves

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Completely, Humanity, Made, Straight, Timber

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.

Belief, Class, Ideas, Individuals, Progress, Race

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

Art, Consciousness, Destroy, Freedom, Morality, Science

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.

Choices, Justice, Knowledge, Loss, Spontaneity, Ultimate

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

Choices, Choose, Entail, Irreparable, Loss, May

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Fatal, Guides, Horizon, Human, Imaginative, Utopia

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, Deciding, Depend, Goal, Men, Nature

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

Exist, History, Law, Morality, Objectivity

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.

Fighting, Ignorance, Men, Revolution, Slavery

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.

Decent, Goal, Powerful, Primary, Rights, Total

The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.

Honesty, Hopeful, Intellectual, Lucidity, Remain

To understand is to perceive patterns.

Patterns, Perceive, Understand, Understanding, Wisdom

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

Freedom, Meant, Sheep, Wolves

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.

Everywhere, Hate, Look, Looks, Rage

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

Discovered, Interesting, Prove, Reason, Supposing That

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.

Communities, Community, Desire, High, Individual, Individuals

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Communication, Exhausted, Language, Listen, Speaker

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