Isaiah Berlin Quotes

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.

We want to challenge the established ideas with new ideas.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.

Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

To innovate is not to reform.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Look - There's good creepy and there's bad creepy. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

I've always been interested in people who think out of their time, and I have this passion, actually, for science. I'm just so enormously interested in how, when you think of these revolutionary ideas, other people get threatened, especially if you are different.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

Nobody says you have to be shackled to tradition.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

Mainstream science starts as heresy.

Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

… there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

Innovation never comes from the established institutions.