Isaiah Berlin

"We inherit not just genes but sensibilities, assumptions, and values we scarcely recognize as inherited."

"The concept of human nature, if it exists at all, is far more diverse and contradictory than any unified theory allows."

"Gratitude, sincerely expressed, is revolutionary in a world that assumes everyone owes everyone something."

"The greatest leaders are those who recognize the limits of their own wisdom."

"We are all trying to be heroes in our own stories, yet the narrative often sees us as supporting characters."

"Adventure is not escape from life, but engagement with life's full possibilities."

"The pursuit of happiness often destroys the possibility of happiness."

"Humor is the recognition that some situations contain irresolvable contradictions; laughter is defiance."

"We underestimate how much of what we believe we have inherited from sources we no longer remember."

"The greatest strength is sometimes the refusal to exercise the power one possesses."

"The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in the death of friends and teachers is that they live on in their books, in the work they have done, and in the thought they have transmitted to us."

"Liberty is not the absence of all restraint, but the right to choose your own chains."

"To understand a man you must know his memories. The same is true of nations. But the memories which matter for this purpose are not the chronologies of history."

"The most fundamental of all rights is the right to be let alone."

"If I have ever succeeded in achieving anything of value, it is because I am compulsively interested in ideas as they actually are."

"Every man has some conviction that by being good he is buying something. The stone age no less than the commercial age."

"One of the great errors of our times is that too much value is placed upon social life and too little upon solitude."

"To impose unity where it is not there is a terrible thing. Pluralism is a fact of human experience."

"The notion that you can painlessly extract the good from the traditions of the past whilst dismissing everything else as rubbish is the silliest of delusions."

"The liberty of the ancients was participatory, the liberty of the moderns is protective."

"What interests me most is the problem of how we are to live in a world where so many deeply held values conflict with each other."

"The pursuit of the unconditioned by the conditioned is the defining feature of human consciousness."

"I am convinced that pluralism, with the measure of 'negative' liberty that it requires, seems the only civilized answer to the problem of how to live."

"Education is not merely the transmission of knowledge but the creation of conditions for the growth of thought."

"The ideas of the great philosophers live on in ways they themselves could never have predicted."

"To live without freedom is to exist, not to live."

"The thirst for some final solution is the greatest enemy of rational thought."

"History is not the subject of a structure that binds all events together. History is composed of scattered events and ideas."

"We are often told to follow our dreams, but no one tells us what to do when the dream is a nightmare."

"The capacity to dislike what we see and wish to change it is itself a human gift."