Isaiah Berlin Quotes

In the past, secularists sought to challenge dogma by the use of rational argument, claiming, for example, that miracles described in the Bible are scientifically impossible.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.

Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer.

America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

What the founders of modern science ... had to do was to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

Cant you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.

I am a humble adherent of...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

[In] the post-Enlightenment world, science [has] taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition.

This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.

We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind

A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Interest in Education will acquire great strength only from the moment when belief in a God and His care is renounced, just as the art of healing could only flourish when the belief in miracle cures ceased.

The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.