Isaiah Berlin

“The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.”

“Human ends are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.”

“The fundamental sense of justice is mercy.”

“Pluralism... seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of 'positive' self-mastery.”

“To understand is to perceive patterns.”

“The essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed up in some vast system.”

“There is no necessary connection between knowledge and virtue.”

“The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been a mark of high civilization.”

“Not all truths are compatible with one another.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

“Liberty for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

“To manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you—the social reformer—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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going.”

“In the end, what is responsibility? It is to be able to answer for one's conduct.”

“Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.”