Isaiah Berlin Quotes

We learn that Comrade [President of South Africa Nelson] Mandela has announced in a speech that he hopes for a bright future in South Africa for ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ Anyone who has thought about it realizes that liberty and equality are antithetical concepts. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you certainly cannot have both. As to that, either concept is a rather futile goal. Equality is biologically impossible, and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous populations very thinly spread.

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

If you have maximum liberty then the strong can destroy the weak, and if you have absolute equality, you cannot have absolute liberty …. Total liberty can be dreadful, total equality can be equally frightful.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

The tensions between order and liberty, between opportunity and social justice will always be there, but that’s freedom.

The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.

If the President takes away from the strong man the right to hit the little man over the head with a club, is that too great curtailment of liberty? We must assure the little man's right not to be clubbed.

If the strong exploit the weak, democracy will not be stable.

Although it may be difficult in theory to know what is just and equal, the practical difficulty of inducing those to forbear who can, if they like, encroach, is far greater, for the weaker are always asking for equality and justice, but the stronger care for none of these things.

They have rights who dare maintain them.

... anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.

We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.

Many entire nations are marginalised by the more powerful nations. That is causing imbalance, violence and terror. Women must do their best to introduce another perspective.

Unequal group rights, the politics of redistribution and a Constitution whose meaning varies with changeable coalitions are a recipe for civil war.