Author details
All Isaiah Berlin Quotes
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
Isaiah Berlin
58% of people like this quote
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.
Isaiah Berlin
53% of people like this quote
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Isaiah Berlin
53% of people like this quote
The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
Isaiah Berlin
51% of people like this quote
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.
Isaiah Berlin
48% of people like this quote
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.
Isaiah Berlin
44% of people like this quote
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.
Isaiah Berlin
44% of people like this quote
Related authors