Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.
Isaiah BerlinThere is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.
Isaiah BerlinOne must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.
Isaiah BerlinThe trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.
Isaiah BerlinFew things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.
Isaiah Berlin