Quotations by Isaiah Berlin

Diels-Kranz, fr. 44 B, col. ii, lines 24–35: ‘None of us is by definition barbarian or Greek, for we all breathe out into the air by mouth and nostrils.’ There is a good version of the same thought earlier in the fragment.

Poetics 1451b11

Nicomachean Ethics 1134b26 (freely rendered)

Pierre Bayle, Commentaire philosophique (1686), part 1, chapter 1: p. 368, col. 1, in Oeuvres diverses de Mr Pierre Bayle (La Haye, 1737), vol. 2

Attributed by J. S. Mill in Utilitarianism, chapter 5 [near end]: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto/London, 1981–  ), vol. 10 (1969), p. 257

Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays (London, 1899), chapter 6 (‘The Conception of Liberty [. . .]’), 3 (b), p. 136 (146 in 2001 ed.). Commenting on Bosanquet, J. P. Plamenatz uses the distinction between negative and positive liberty distinction in Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation (London, 1938; 2nd ed., 1968), p. 35.

A. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridsati tomakh, Pis´ma, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1976), item 707, p. 273, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889; see p. 464 for the comment that ‘This idea had already been expressed by Chekhov in the summer of 1889 at Yalta, in conversation with I. Ya. Gurlyand: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” From Gurlyand’s “Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov”, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No 28, 11 July, p. 521.’ Another version is quoted in S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911): ‘If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’

Paraphrase: see Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société (1822): p. 14 in Auguste Comte, Systéme de politique positive, vol. 1, part 1 (Paris, 1824); p. 53 in Auguste Comte, ‘Appendice général du système de politique positive’, in Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851–4), vol. 4 (1854). Mill quotes this passage in Auguste Comte and Positivism: pp. 301–2 in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto/London, 1981–  ), vol. 10.

Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, ed. O. H. Prior and Yvon Belaval (Paris, 1970), p. 228

Cf. ‘Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages. Nor are these advantages attended with disadvantages, that bear any proportion to them.’

Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’: p. 271 in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985: Liberty Fund)

This remark, often mistakenly attributed to Pisarev (even by Gorky), appears to have its true origins in a satirical ‘extract’ from a ‘novel’ (entitled Shchedrodarov), contributed by Dostoevsky to the May 1864 issue (No 5) of his journal Epokha. This pastiche is aimed against the nihilists, who appear in it under thinly disguising pseudonyms. On p. 281 the eponymous character Shchedrodarov (Saltykov-Shchedrin), who has recently joined the editorial board of the journal Svoevremenny – a board whose members include Pravdolyubov (Dobrolyubov) and Skribov (Pisarev) – encounters the board’s editorial principle that ‘a pair of boots are, in every sense, better than Pushkin, because [. . .] Pushkin is mere luxury and nonsense’; and, a little later, ‘Shakespeare too is mere luxury and nonsense’. (Perhaps Dostoevsky had in mind Pushkin’s own remark in a letter of March 1823 that he looked on his poems ‘as a cobbler looks on a pair of boots. I sell for profit [. . .]’, even though this letter was not published until 1903.) Versions of this ‘principle’, mentioning Pushkin rather than Shakespeare, appear in Saltykov-Schedrin’s Gentlemen of Tashkent (1869–72) – p. 102 in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1970) – and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871–2: part 1, chapter 1, section 6). In due course the Shakespearian version became current, and began to be attributed to Pisarev.

In P. Enfantin and H. Saint-Simon, Science de l’homme: physiologie religieuse (Paris, 1858), p. 199.

Encheiridion 19. 2.

Fragment 247 Arrighetti.

Summarising Joseph de Maistre’s response to the first sentence of Rousseau’s Contrat social: Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle, 1st series (Paris, 1899), p. 41

Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, 1845–6), vol. 6, p. 383

‘Sonate’, in the Encyclopédie (revised for Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, 1768)

‘Our Diversions’, 3, ‘The Doll Souse’ (1924): p. 49 in Abinger Harvest (London, 1936). (‘This’ is Queen Mary’s dolls’ house.)

Preface (1834) to Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835); the full original appears below.

(Classicism is health, romanticism is disease.)

J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life, 2 April 1829

The origin of this odd saying, whose currency is largely due to Hegel and Marx, takes a little explaining. Its original form is ‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus’ (‘Rhodes is here, here is the place for your jump’), a traditional Latin translation [see, e.g., Erasmus, Adagia 3. 3. 28] of a punchline from Aesop. In the fable ‘The Braggart’ an athlete boasts that he once performed a stupendous jump in Rhodes, and can produce witnesses: the punchline is the comment of a bystander, who means that there is no need of witnesses, since the athlete can demonstrate the jump here and now.
    The epigram is given by Hegel, rather out of the blue, first in Greek, then in Latin (in the form ‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus’), in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner, vol. 7] (Stuttgart, 1928), p. 35.] He does not explain what the proverb meant in its original context (without which it can hardly be understood); indeed a comment he makes about jumping over Rhodes suggests that he may not have fully understood it himself. At any rate, he then offers an adapted German version with a different meaning, ‘Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze’ (‘Here is the rose, dance here’, an allusion to the rose in the cross of rosicrucianism, implying that fulfilment should not be postponed to some Utopian future), punning first on the Greek (Rhodos = Rhodes, rhodon = rose), then on the Latin (saltus = jump [noun], salta = dance [imperative]). Marx adopts the saying in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1956–83), vol. 8, p. 118.], where he first gives the Latin, in the form ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta!’, a garbled mixture of Hegel’s two versions, and then immediately adds ‘Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!’, as if it were a translation, which it cannot be, since Greek Rhodos (despite what all the standard commentators say to the contrary), let alone Latin Rhodus, does not mean ‘rose’.
    The confusion, both deliberate and inadvertent, does no credit to either Hegel or Marx as classical scholars, and the epigram loses much of its original power – as well as its original meaning – in their hands. They were evidently intent on turning it to other purposes, but it seems doubtful whether their attempts to improve on Aesop have been of much use to their readers.

Based on Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), vol. 4, p. 306

The Russian phrase is probably a translation by Mikhail L. Mikhailov of ‘die verdammten Fragen’ from Heine’s poem ‘Zum Lazarus’, in ‘Gedichte/1853 und 1854’, Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, p. 225. For Mikhailov’s version see his ‘Stikhotvoreniya Geine’ (‘Poems of Heine’), Sovremennik 1858 No 3, p. 125

Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877–1913), vol. 29, p. 366

Paraphrase: see ‘From the Other Shore’, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954–66), vol. 6, p. 51

Paraphrase: see Sobranie sochinenii, vol 6, pp. 33, 335

Paraphrase: see Sobranie sochinenii, vol 6, pp. 36, 338: ‘because there is no libretto. And if there were a libretto, history would lose all interest and become useless, boring, a joke [. . .]’, ‘and this is difficult, especially when there is no libretto. And if there were a libretto, then history would be unnecessary, and then it [would be] a practical joke’

Cf. ‘Glüklich seyn! mir ist, als hätt’ ich Brei und laues Wasser auf der Zunge, wenn ihr mir sprecht von glüklich seyn.’ Hyperion, vol. 1, book 1: ii 118 in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert v. Hellingrath, Friedrich Seebass and Ludwig v. Pigenot (Berlin, 1943)

Horace, Odes 4. 12

The Quarrel Between the Faculties (1798), 2nd footnote to § 6 of II: Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900–  ), vol. 7, p. 87, line 19

Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20, p. 94, lines 1–3

Critique of Practical Reason, part 1, book 1, chapter 1, section 8, theorem 4

For this fundamental Marxist formula (not apparently expressed in exactly these terms by Marx himself, nor by Engels) see Georg Lukács, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ (1919): pp. 2–3 in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1971). Leszek Kolakowski offers as a gloss ‘the understanding and transformation of reality are not two separate processes, but one and the same phenomenon’: Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford, 1978: Oxford University Press), vol. 3, The Breakdown, p. 270. For Soviet philosophy, in which it is repeated ad nauseam, it meant roughly ‘Physical sciences should work for Soviet industry; social and human sciences are instruments of political propaganda.’ Similar locutions (which should not, however, be regarded as equivalent in meaning, even mutatis mutandis) are used by Marx’s contemporaries. For example, Mill himself attributes the ‘union of theory and practice’ to the ancient Greeks in ‘On Genius’ (1832) at i 336; there are also references by Auguste Comte to ‘harmonie entre la théorie et la pratique’ (‘harmony between theory and practice’) in Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851–4), vol. 4, pp. 7, 172. More generally, of course, discussion of the relationship of theory and practice goes back to antiquity, perhaps originating in Socrates’ doctrine that virtue is knowledge; see also Diogenes Laertius 7. 125 on the Stoic view that ‘the virtuous man is both a theorist, and a practitioner of things doable’. Especially well known is Leibniz’s recommendation in 1700 ‘Theoriam cum praxi zu vereinigen’ (‘to combine theory with practice’) in his proposal to establish a Brandenburg Academy in Berlin – see Hans-Stephan Brather, Leibniz und seine Akademie: Ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der Berliner Sozietät der Wissenschaften 1697–1716 (Berlin, 1993), p. 72.

J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chapter 3: vol. 18, p. 266, in in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson and others (Toronto/London, 1963–91). The last two phrases are from John Sterling’s 1838 essay on Simonides: vol. 1, p. 190, in Essays and Tales, ed. Julius Charles Hare (London, 1848).

De l’esprit des lois, book 1, chapter 1

IB, ‘L. B. Namier – A Personal Impression’, PI ?? [1st ed., 71–2]

Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), ‘Sprüche und Pfeile’, No 12: p. 55 in Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, part 6, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1969)

Protagoras 361b, Meno 87d–88d

Quoted by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2. 61

‘On the Terms “Classical” and “Romantic”’, Studies in Literature [first series] (Cambridge, 1918), p. 94

Torquato Tasso in Tasso’s Tod: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Hamburg, 1835: Hoffman und Campe), act 1, scene 3, p. 56.

Title of part 2, chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 350–6), of Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London, 1927: Oxford University Press [Italian original 1925])

‘grand simplificateur’ is Sainte-Beuve, coining ‘simplificateur’ in the process: ‘[. . .] il [Franklin] était lui-même, dans ses manières générales de voir et de présenter les choses, un grand, un trop grand simplificateur.’ In ‘Franklin à Passy’ (29 November 1852): p. 181 in C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, 16 vols (Paris, [1926–42]), vol. 7; ‘terribles simplificateurs’ is a phrase coined by Jacob Burckhardt in a letter of 24 July 1889 to Friedrich von Preen: p. 203 in Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe, ed. Max Burckhardt, vol. 9 (Basel/Stuttgart, 1980); the idea appears in earlier letters, and the phrase ‘furchtbaren Simplificateurs’ in a letter of 18 July 1885 to Max Alioth, but this is the first occurrence of the full French phrase; cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois xxix 18 (‘Des idées d’uniformité’)

See Georg G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority (The Hague, 1958), p. 151, note 3

For this anecdote see Louis Reybaud, Études sur les Réformateurs ou socialistes modernes (1840), chapter 2, ‘Saint-Simon et les Saint-Simoniens’: vol. 1, p. 67 in the 7th ed. (Paris, 1864). It also appears in M. G. Hubbard, Saint-Simon: sa vie et ses travaux (Paris, 1857), p. 9

‘Über das Erhabene’ [On the Sublime], in Schillers Werke, ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Wiese, vol. 21 (Weimar, 1963), p. 38, lines 8–9

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, 1943), p. 243

The Theory of Moral Sentiments IV 1. 10, p. 184 in Glasgow Edition (Oxford, 1976); An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations IV ii 9, p. 456 in the same edition (Oxford, 1976). Cf. Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ‘History of Astronomy’ III 2, p. 49 in the same edition (Oxford, 1980).

Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau (Paris, 1788; photographic reprint, Geneva, 1979), letter 5 (p. 88)

Commonitorium 2. 3

The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman and others, vol. 114 (Banbury, 1973), p. 155

In M. Aug. Gottlieb Spangenbergs Apologetische Schluß-Schrift [. . .] (Leipzig and Görlitz, 1752; photographically reprinted as Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Ergänzungsbände zu den Hauptschriften, ed. Erich Beyreuther and Gerhard Meyer, vol. 3, Hildesheim 1964), p. 181