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To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men.

— Isaiah Berlin Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (1974)

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More quotes by Isaiah Berlin

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

The Listener (1978)

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Liberty (2002)

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Liberty (2002)

Knowledge increases autonomy both in the sense of Kant, and in that of Spinoza and his followers.

Liberty (2002)

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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die.

Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

The thunderstorm is a constant phenomenon, raging alternately over some part of the world or the other. Can a single man or creature escape death if all that charge of lightning strikes the earth?

Kalki Krishnamurthy Sivakozhundu of Tiruvazhundur (1939)

So what if a kid dies? God will take care of him.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Isaiah Berlin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.