“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.”
英语
“狐狸知道很多事情，但刺猬知道一件大事。在那些将一切与某个单一核心愿景联系起来的人和那些追求许多目标、这些目标往往互不相关甚至相互矛盾的人之间，存在着巨大的鸿沟。”
“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?"”
英语
“消极意义上的自由涉及对这个问题的回答："在什么范围内，主体——一个人或一群人——被允许或应当被允许去做或成为他能做或能成为的，而不受他人干涉？"”
“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.”
英语
“强制一个人就是剥夺他的自由——免于什么的自由？人类历史上几乎每一位道德哲学家都赞美过自由。就像幸福和善、自然和实在一样，这个词的含义是如此多孔，以至于似乎没有什么解释是它能够抵挡的。”
“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.”
英语
“自由的根本意义是免于枷锁、免于囚禁、免于被他人奴役。其余的都是这个意义的延伸，否则就是隐喻。”
“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.”
英语
“认为规范问题必定存在最终的客观答案，存在可以被证明或直接直觉到的真理，认为原则上有可能发现一种所有价值都得到调和的和谐模式——这就是我所说的柏拉图式理想。”
“Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.”
英语
“很少有新的真理能够在既有观念的抵抗下赢得一席之地，除非它们被过度陈述。”