Jews From The United Kingdom

"After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron."

"A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, rather than the author."

"Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm."

"There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats."

"Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe."

"Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation."

"The negroes are lovers of ludicrous actions, and hence all their ceremonies seem farcical."

"To bend and prostrate oneself to express sentiments of respect, appears to be a natural motion."

"If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner."

"Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize."

"The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation."

"RS: If we are still living tomorrow, we at least have the possibility to read good books. For example those of the Jewish liberal Isaiah Berlin, who you also knew in person. What did you learn from him? JG: Isaiah was an incredibly tolerant person – and I believe that tolerance is an essential part of liberalism. Because tolerance means nothing other than everyone can become happy in his or her own way, as long as it does not bother others. Where tolerance is lacking, there is a need for legislation, rights, entitlements. RS: Berlin was a representative of negative liberty. To put it bluntly: to be free means to be left in peace by others. JG: Freedom is the absence of human obstacles that force me to act and live in a way I do not want to act or live. As long as man does not harm anyone, he can live how he wants to live – even if he does harm to himself. That must be borne by the others. Tolerance means precisely that I do not demand from others to live as I want to live. Negative freedom and tolerance are mutually dependent. Berlin was not a liberal fundamentalist – he accepted that in addition to the correct understanding of freedom there are also other values such as justice and social peace. Again, in the end consensus and weighing up are indispensable in a free society."

"The [NYT] Times is absolutely committed to making sure that this guy does not get elected. So his perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he’s not mistaken in that perception, and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the Resistance. What does that mean? That’s not said by people who consider themselves reporters, objective reporters of facts. That’s the kind of language that’s used by people who genuinely believe, and I rather suspect with some justification, that Donald Trump is bad for the United States, and they’re betting that the sooner he’s out of office, the better they will like it. Whether that happens by virtue of indictment, impeachment or election, we’ll see… We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were."

"I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about The Washington Post these days, we’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States. We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times—right now that would never have appeared 50 years ago—analysis, commentary—on the front page."

"This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap."

"I am a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, whose essays in the history of ideas provide one model for what I do here; nonetheless, there are moments in his work that make the reader wonder whether it is Montesquieu speaking or Berlin, or whether Machiavelli would have recognized the causes for which Berlin recruited him."

"There is no need for me to introduce, much less recommend, Mr Isaiah Berlin to you. His learning is notorious, and joined with it is a brilliant turn of dialectic which has dazzled many audiences. Listening to him you may think that you are in the presence of one of the great intellectual virtuosos of our time: a Paganini of ideas. And you would not be wrong. But do not be deceived. The art of which he is a master is not an easy art."

"Bohlen and Isaiah Berlin came to dinner, and we talked until one or two in the morning. Berlin, who is undoubtedly the best informed and most intelligent foreigner in Moscow, said that the only thins he had learned on the occasion of this visit were: (a) the continued existence of the conflict in outlook between age and youth, (b) of the tremendous importance to young people of the feeling of economic security which they have under the Soviet system, and (c) the continued vital importance of Marxist dogma in Soviet thought and action. He agreed with me strongly that American policy must find its expression from now on in action and not in words if it is to do any good. He was firmly convinced that the Russians view a conflict with the Western world as quite inevitable and that their whole policy is predicated on this prospect. I asked him whether they didn't realize that if the conflict came it would be the result of their own tactics and their own insistence that it was inevitable. he said no, that they would view it as inevitable through the logic of the development of social forces. They would say that possibly some of us foreign diplomats and statesmen might consider ourselves friendly to Russia at the moment but that eventually we would find out that we were hostile to them even though we did not know it at the moment."

"Here is the rich man’s John Rawls. Liberalism is for those who don’t need it; free to those who can afford it and very expensive – if even conceivable – to those who cannot. But the clash of ideas here is more chaotic than confused. Should one deduce that liberalism can’t be derived from the experience of pogroms? In that case, why did Berlin argue that liberalism was the answer to the experiences of this uniquely grim – as he thought – century? Meanwhile, if liberalism is geographically and even ethnically limited, where is its universality? (And what became of Namier’s ‘Jews and other coloured peoples’?) Should one be an English invader in order to be a carrier of liberal ideals? Finally, what’s the point of a tumultuous and volatile and above all ‘cosmopolitan’ society, like that of America, if high liberalism can only be established with common blood and on common soil?"

"Sir Isaiah Berlin has always been unhappy about the possibility of a lack of connection between the intellectual and what is actually happening, and he made a beautiful differentiation between intellectuals and the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia of a country (and the whole definition flourished in Russia), is the community of enlightened people who display a high moral concern with what is happening around them. A member of the intelligentsia does not have to be an intellectual or a scholar, Sir Isaiah."

"Neapolitan scholar and Prussian pastor alike, in Berlin’s account of them, move towards the frontier of just such a relativism. They do so because, in tendency if not in letter, their thought (as does Mill’s) denies the existence of any permanent human nature. Variable cultures so shape the different needs and dispositions of their members that no common moral standard is applicable to the species. But after affirming – even applauding – the intransigence of this rejection of ‘the central concept of the Western tradition from the Greeks to Aquinas, from the Renaissance to Grotius, Spinoza, Locke’, Berlin then typically mitigates or retracts it. If The Crooked Timber of Humanity strikes one new note, in fact, it is in the strength of its assurance that Vico or Herder were not after all relativists: ‘this idée reçue seems to me now to be a widespread error, which, I must admit, I have in the past perpetrated myself.’ The reason, Berlin explains, is that however diverse or incompatible cultures may be, ‘their variety cannot be unlimited, for the nature of men, however various and subject to change, must possess some generic nature if it is to be called human at all.’ Values can thus be plural and conflictual, yet at the same time perfectly objective, because, despite everything, a common human nature does exist, in which they all ultimately come to rest. The intention of this solution is clear – to bar the path from the liberal notion of pluralism to the nihilist consequences of relativism. But it falls short of accomplishing it. The human species could exhibit a range of common characteristics, including a capacity for mutual communication (on which Berlin lays special stress), without these necessarily having any moral import; and if the social codes it develops conflict, value-choices between them will on any definition be subjective. In one of his most acute essays, Berlin taxed Montesquieu with a central inconsistency. On the one hand, De l’Esprit des Lois showed that human laws and morals vary according to material and cultural circumstances, while on the other it upheld the existence of an absolute justice independent of time and place. Berlin comments that ‘the only link between the two doctrines is their common libertarian purpose.’ This is a good description of his own construction. For the best of motives, Berlin wishes to defend cultural pluralism without renouncing moral universalism. It is a more demanding task than he appears to believe."

"Knowledge increases autonomy both in the sense of Kant, and in that of Spinoza and his followers. I should like to ask once more: is all liberty just that? The advance of knowledge stops men from wasting their resources upon delusive projects. It has stopped us from burning witches or flogging lunatics or predicting the future by listening to oracles or looking at the entrails of animals or the flight of birds. It may yet render many institutions and decisions of the present – legal, political, moral, social – obsolete, by showing them to be as cruel and stupid and incompatible with the pursuit of justice or reason or happiness or truth as we now think the burning of widows or eating the flesh of an enemy to acquire skills. If our powers of prediction, and so our knowledge of the future, become much greater, then, even if they are never complete, this may radically alter our view of what constitutes a person, an act, a choice; and eo ipso our language and our picture of the world. This may make our conduct more rational, perhaps more tolerant, charitable, civilised, it may improve it in many ways, but will it increase the area of free choice? For individuals or groups?"

"By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself."

"If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it — as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right."

"I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act."

"The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past."

"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."

"But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them."

"Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience."

"This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike."

"The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting."

"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."

"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."

"The simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society."

"Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality."

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

"What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality."

"While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli."

"What is Life?"

"Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas — ideas and their authors. His contemporaries thought him very ingenious and a little mad."

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

"Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions."

"To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men."

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes."

"The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid Time as ever, Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat, As I pull the parapet's poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens ? What quaver--what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man's veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe-- Just a little white with the dust."

"Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter's cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know. No man knows why. In all men's hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould. Red fangs have torn His face. God's blood is shed. He mourns from His lone place His children dead. O! ancient crimson curse Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom."

"Nudes -- stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire. For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice. And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons' pantomine The place was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the glibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music Blown from Sleep's trumpet."

"In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard. Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking. And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy, although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep; And when the cats come out the rats are sly. Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn. But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful. Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us, but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it. And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through, Where blind farewells are taken easily . . . Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!"

"The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held."