Status Updates From In Search of Isaiah Berlin:...

What makes one a pluralist is that one can, by empathetic imagination, sometimes grasp what other people, in other circumstances, have come to pursue, and not simply rule it out as objectively valueless, and is willing to live or die for, and therefore sometimes to be fought, perhaps to the point of killing.

The idea that human beings are blank slates, limitlessly malleable vessels whose innate structure imposes no restriction on what they can do or be, is self-evidently absurd…

The trouble is, I have had three or four ideas in my life, which I repeat constantly in various forms: incompatibility of values, scientific method inapplicable to humane studies or politics, inevitability, two liberties, and so on. I know that I am very repetitive, and badly need pruning, otherwise reviewers will constantly and rightly comment on this.

…add, in short, his usually penetrating and sympathetic powers of understanding – of people and their motives and hopes and fears as well as of ideas and movements and their origins and offspring – and it will be clear why his work is important. His contribution to our intellectual life is...significantly richer and more humane than the background from which it stands out.