Isaiah Berlin Quotes

“The irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the conviction that human beings are fragile, and that there is value in this very irregularity of their structure, which is violated by attempts to force it into patterns or straightjackets—this and the irrepressible pleasure in exploding all cut and dried social and political schemata which serious-minded and pedantic saviours of mankind, both radical and conservative, were perpetually manufacturing, inevitably made Herzen unpopular among the earnest and the devout of all camps.32”
― John Gray, Isaiah Berlin

“Homer’s ideal of the warrior cannot be reconciled with the Buddha’s ideal of compassionate detachment, Jesus’ love of humility with Aristotle’s notion of ‘the great-souled man’ or Machiavelli’s account of the prince with the Christian conception of a just ruler.”
― John Gray, Isaiah Berlin

“Berlin never developed any explicit critique of legalist liberalism. One reason for this, I suspect, is that he never took it very seriously—an attitude with which I was sympathetic, and continue to share. As he put it to me on one occasion, a ‘theory of justice’ was ‘not possible or necessary’.”
― John Gray, Isaiah Berlin

“It is a distinctive feature of Berlin’s liberal outlook that, while remaining steadfastly committed to Enlightenment values of toleration, liberty and human emancipation from ignorance and oppression, it rejects the Enlightenment conception which sees universalizing reason as the mark of man, and a rational society, in which particularism has been transcended or else domesticated, as the telos, the aim, goal, or end of history.”
― John N. Gray, Isaiah Berlin