Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
Isaiah BerlinRead
Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between different ultimate human values and the necessity of making difficult choices.
Isaiah Berlin's quote reflects on the inherent struggle in human existence where we must often choose between competing values such as liberty, equality, and happiness. Each of these values is sought after for its own sake, but when they clash, we face the dilemma of sacrificing one for the sake of another, which can lead to tragic outcomes.
In practice
In a debate about social justice, this quote can illustrate the complexities of balancing liberty and equality.
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
The President to-night has a dream: - He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said: - "He is a very common-looking man". The President replied: - "The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them".
And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
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