Isaiah Berlin Quotes

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

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Isaiah Berlin

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

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
Isaiah Berlin

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

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
Isaiah Berlin

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
Isaiah Berlin

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

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.
Isaiah Berlin

To understand is to perceive patterns.
Isaiah Berlin

George Berkeley Quotes

A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
George Berkeley

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.
George Berkeley

From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.
George Berkeley

He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
George Berkeley

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
George Berkeley

If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.
George Berkeley

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
George Berkeley

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
George Berkeley

So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
George Berkeley

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
George Berkeley

That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man.
George Berkeley

The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it.
George Berkeley

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.
George Berkeley

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
George Berkeley

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
George Berkeley

Raymond Aron Quotes

Foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.
Raymond Aron

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.
Raymond Aron

Paddy Ashdown Quotes

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.
Paddy Ashdown

I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do.
Paddy Ashdown

I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.
Paddy Ashdown

I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.
Paddy Ashdown

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.
Paddy Ashdown

I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.
Paddy Ashdown

I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold.
Paddy Ashdown

I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.
Paddy Ashdown

I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
Paddy Ashdown

It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations.
Paddy Ashdown

It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.
Paddy Ashdown

It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.
Paddy Ashdown

It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.
Paddy Ashdown

Maybe it's legitimate criticism, though it can be hurtful. Maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention to the people with whom I would have a natural affinity as a liberal, and they feel let down by that.
Paddy Ashdown

My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.
Paddy Ashdown

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
Paddy Ashdown

Politics is compromise.
Paddy Ashdown

The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?
Paddy Ashdown

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.
Paddy Ashdown