“The essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed up in some vast system; and in the right to resist, to be unpopular, to stand up for your convictions merely because they are your convictions. That is true freedom, and without it there is neither freedom of any kind, nor even the illusion of it.”
Isaiah Berlin - Freedom and its Betrayal*
*London and Princeton, 2002, pp. 103-4. The lectures that comprise Freedom and its Betrayal were delivered in 1952. (Berlin uses the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ interchangeably.)
One Comment
Freedom is awesome, but betrayal isn’t. It carries a feeling of guilt in your heart.