Isaiah Berlin
British · 1909–1997
Latvian-born British philosopher and historian of ideas, renowned for his distinction between positive and negative liberty, his defense of value pluralism against monism, and his vivid intellectual portraits of Russian thinkers.
Wikipedia ↗“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision and those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.”
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“Liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: "What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?"”
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“To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom — freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.”
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“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.”
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“The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truths that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious pattern in which all values are reconciled — this is what I shall call the Platonic ideal.”
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“Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.”
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