The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

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.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

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.