Tao Te Ching
Isaiah Berlin
1909 – 1997 CE
"the world's greatest talker"
Philosopher, political theorist, translator and historian; Berlin lived in Petrograd when he was six during the Russian revolutions of 1917 and then moved to the UK. A star student, he translated famous books from Russian into English and joined the Diplomatic Service during World War II. Highly respected for his lifetime of defending civil liberties, pluralism, and liberal theory; he also became a strong and lasting voice against Communism. With penetrating insight he applied the lessons of history to modern-day problems like nationalism, totalitarianism, racism, and religious bigotry.
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Sources
Unlisted Sources
Five Essays on Liberty (2002)
The Proper Study of Mankind
Two Concepts of Liberty
Quotes by Isaiah Berlin (20 quotes)
“To understand Hebrew scripture is not enough... we must transport ourselves into a distant land and an earlier age, and read it as the national poem of the Jews, a pastoral and agricultural people, written in ancient, simple, rustic, poetic, not philosophical or abstract language.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“[Moral conflicts are] an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life... These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“I am a Russian Jew from Riga, and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life.”
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“Socrates thought that if certainty could be established in our knowledge of the external world by rational methods, the same methods would surely yield equal certainty in the field of human behavior—how to live, what to be.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Plato thought that an elite of sages who arrived at such certainty should be given the power of governing others intellectually less well endowed, in obedience to patterns dictated by the correct solutions to personal and social problems.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“The Stoics thought that the attainment of these solutions was in the power of any man who set himself to live according to reason.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Some, like Tolstoy, found this in the outlook of simple people, unspoiled by civilization; like Rousseau, he wished to believe that the moral universe of peasants was not unlike that of children, not distorted by the conventions and institution of civilization, which sprang from human vices”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Jews, Christians, Muslims believed that the true answers had been revealed by God to his chosen prophets and saints, and accepted the interpretation of these revealed truths by qualified teachers and the traditions to which they belonged.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Machiavelli... undermined my earlier assumption, based on the philosophia perennis, that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Machiavelli made a deep and lasting impression upon me, shook my earlier faith... he thought it possible to restore something like the Roman Republic... but Machiavelli also sets side by side with this the notion of Christian virtues”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Schopenhauer drew a gloomy picture of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly determined laws of the universe... and the consequent desirability of reducing human vulnerability by reducing man himself... that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is foolishly ambitious, and grotesquely overestimates his capacities.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Pasternak was a poet of genius in all that he did and was... I visited him almost weekly, and came to know him well. I cannot hope to describe the transforming effect of his presence, his voice and gestures.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“The only other person I have met who talked as he [Pasternak] talked was Virginia Woolf, who made one's mind race as he did, and obliterated one's normal vision of reality in the same exhilarating and, at times, terrifying way.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”
from Five Essays on Liberty (2002)
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“Tolstoy was the least superficial of men... At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilized world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“the destruction of traditional hierarchies and orders of social life... deprived great numbers of men of social and emotional security, produced the notorious phenomena of alienation, spiritual homelessness, and growing anomie”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“socialists believed that class solidarity, the fraternity of the exploited, and the prospect of a just and rational society would provide this social cement. But for the majority, the vacuum was filled by the old traditional bonds—language, the soil, historical memories—symbols that proved far more powerful than either socialists or enlightened liberals wished to believe.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“Pasternak was a Russian patriot—his sense of his own historical connection with his country was very deep... This passionate, almost obsessive, desire to be thought a true Russian writer, with roots deep in Russian soil, was particularly evident in his negative feelings toward his Jewish origins.. he wished the Jews to disappear as a people.”
from The Proper Study of Mankind
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“In the ideal society, composed of wholly responsible beings, laws, because I should scarcely be conscious of them, would gradually wither away.”
from Two Concepts of Liberty
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“One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the belief that... there is a final solution.”
from Two Concepts of Liberty
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Quotes about Isaiah Berlin (3 quotes)
“His was an exuberant life crowded with joys – the joy of thought, the joy of music, the joy of good friends. ... The theme that runs throughout his work is his concern with liberty and the dignity of human beings .... Sir Isaiah radiated well-being.”
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“Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential.”
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“I am a Russian Jew from Riga, and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life.”
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