I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I … - Isaiah Berlin

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There isn't a flight goes by when I don't stare out of the window and thank my stars for what I'm seeing and feeling.

Isaiah Berlin

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

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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, Differ, Mad, Sole, Truth, Wicked

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.

Essence, Freedom, Human, Men, Objects

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

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 unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Believed, Berlin, Chosen, Human, Liberty, Sake

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

Fairness And Equality, Justice, Liberty, Quiet