The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been the markof high civilisation both on the part of individuals and communities.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.