Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

You can’t stop the march of mind, all you can do is to prevent it from being misused.

Civilization means that you must allow the possibility of change without ceasing to be totally dedicated to—and ready to die for—your ideals so long as you believe in them

But what mind can achieve, it should

Once you know what has to be done, you can do it by persuasion or by force and that denies basic human rights—above all of choice—lack of freedom of choice means dehumanization

the need to belong to a community is a basic human need, just as strong as that for eating, drinking, warmth, security

Hatred can sharpen vision as much as love

there must be no habits, no rules which people could rely on: otherwise things would remain unmalleable. But if you accuse people of breaking laws that they did not break, of crimes that they did not commit, of acts which they could not even understand—that would reduce them to pulp. Then nobody would know where they were, nobody was ever safe, since whatever you did, or did not do, you still might be destroyed.

Any regime which forbids or limits criticism, save in the most desperate situations in which unanimity is needed to avert total chaos or destruction, is on the way to totalitarianism or some other fanaticism

there is nothing more destructive of human lives than fanatical conviction about the perfect life, allied to political or military power

If one wishes to prevent the harm done by fanatics, one must try to understand the intellectual, not merely the psychological, roots of their beliefs; one must try to demonstrate to them that they are wrong.