A Quote by Isaiah Berlin

The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.

Isaiah Berlin

Quote Topics

Age Best Century Courage Day Disinterested Disinterested Love Eighteenth Century Episodes Gifted Honesty Hopeful Intellectual Life Love Lucidity Mankind Most Parallel Power Remain Thinkers This Day Truth Without

Quote Author

Isaiah Berlin
Russian - Philosopher
June 6, 1909 - November 5, 1997

Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

The Founding Fathers were truly some of the most gifted thinkers in history. They understood that power could be used to corrupt.

Trish Regan

President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.

Ben Shapiro

How mankind defers from day to day the best it can do, and the most beautiful things it can enjoy, without thinking that every day may be the last one, and that lost time is lost eternity!

Max Muller

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

Bertrand Russell

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world.

Ammon Hennacy

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose... one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites --- polar opposites --- so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love... What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers who go beyond it.

David Hume

The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.

bell hooks

Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force is the most potent instrument available in mankind's quest for peace and security.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

Ludwig von Mises

As for what I look for, I don't know any other way to put it, but I look for truth, and honesty, because that's something that's few and far between. And obviously, someone who takes care of herself physically. But truth, honesty, and love, that's what's most important. Oh, and someone who can vibe to some jazz. Because I love jazz music a lot.

Trevante Rhodes

To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.

Brigid Brophy

Truth, honesty, perseverance, strength, love of all kinds and forgiveness are all beautiful, Tack. The most beautiful stories ever told are the most difficult to take.

Kristen Ashley

... my century.. is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form.