“Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.”
Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (1950)
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Isaiah Berlin 30
Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philoso… 1909–1997Related quotes

“Historians may lie, but History cannot.”
Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.
Source: 1960s, Conflict and defense: A general theory, 1962, p. 2, partly cited in: Dennis Sandole (1998) A Comprehensive Mapping Of Conflict And Conflict. Resolution: A Three Pillar Approach http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/pcs/sandole.htm

“To understand is to perceive patterns.”

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 6 - A Spiritual Warrior's View of the World

Source: Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989), p. 241
Context: I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition … we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

1940s, To Every Briton (1940)
Context: I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption. Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans. The only difference is that perhaps yours are not as thorough as the Germans. If that be so, yours will soon acquire the same thoroughness as theirs, if not much greater. On no other condition can you win the war. In other words, you will have to be more ruthless than the Nazis. No cause, however just, can warrant the indiscriminate slaughter that is going on minute by minute. I suggest that a cause that demands the inhumanities that are being perpetrated today cannot be called just.