Success Quote by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin slices through a comforting political fantasy: that history is a hospital and ideology is the cure. Yes, he grants, the big bruises of society - injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - can be treated with reform or, if you insist, revolution. Then he flips the frame. Human beings are not primarily anti-something machines. They are pro-something creatures, driven by ends that proliferate beyond any planner's flowchart.

The subtext is Berlin's signature warning against monism: the idea that there exists one master value (equality, nation, faith, reason, the people) that can harmonize all others if only the obstacles are cleared. He insists the opposite. "Positive goals" are "seldom predictable" because they grow out of plural selves and plural cultures, and they're "at times incompatible" because real moral life contains collisions that can't be engineered away. Freedom can clash with security; mercy with justice; artistic excellence with mass access; national self-rule with cosmopolitan obligations. The point isn't to romanticize conflict, but to refuse the lie that conflict is merely a temporary bug in the system.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of 20th-century totalitarianism, Berlin had watched utopian promises turn into coercion, precisely because they treated disagreement as pathology. The rhetorical move here is deceptively calm: a polite concession to the reformers, followed by a devastating premise change. Politics can't just be extermination of evils; it's permanent negotiation among goods.