Isaiah Berlin in San Francisco

San Francisco's a big city that likes to think of itself as small, but it's not.

Bad things happen here just as often as good things happen, though we like to think more good things happen here than bad.

The time spent by those living in San Francisco trying to understand man and man's responsibility to other men is no more or no less here than the time spent thinking about these things by those who live in other cities.

Most people really don't want you to succeed; they don't necessarily want you to fail but they also don't want you to succeed. Some of these people live in San Francisco, and some live somewhere else.

To think freely, like a liberal humanist, you must be willing to step out of yourself and to enter the world of another so that another's point of view can be understood, even appreciated, by yourself and others.

Yesterday, I was consoled by the thought that it was possible there were more people in San Francisco who were thinking like me than there were people who were not thinking like me, people who didn't like the way I think. 

As I looked out at the big city that thinks of itself as small, Isaiah Berlin's touchstone language kept coming to me--liberty to wolves means death to sheep--and I couldn't stop thinking about it and what it really means.