Free Will Quotes - Page 2

• The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

  C. S. Lewis

  Angel, Men, Facts

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Dollar Bills, Dollars, Way

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters: A Novel”, p.218, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

  Charles Darwin

  Law, Fixed, Results

  Charles Darwin (2003). “On the Origin of Species”, p.431, Broadview Press

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• Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Believe, Men, Weight

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook J 249, 1799.

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• Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Men, Two

  Mark Twain (2015). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.126, Univ of California Press

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• The purpose of problems is to push you toward obedience to God's laws, which are exact and cannot be changed. We have the free will to obey them or disobey them. Obedience will bring harmony, disobedience will bring you more problems.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Peace, Law, Mulling Over

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.59, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• People allow themselves to be slaves of their bad habits and society's bad habits - but they have free will, and if they wish to be free they can.

  Peace Pilgrim

  People, Wish, Slave

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• I believe for God not to allow pain to happen in the world is for Him to extract free will from the world.

  Max Lucado

  Pain, Believe, World

  Source: edition.cnn.com

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• There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

  Agatha Christie

  Men, Umpires, Evil

  AGATHA CHRISTIE (1980). “MISS MARPLE MEETS MURDER”

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• There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex behavioural patterns can be triggered by a tiny concentration of moleculas coursing through the bloodstream, and that different animals of the same species generate different amounts of these hormones, is something worth thinking about when it's time to judge such matters as free will, individual responsibility, and law and order.

  Carl Sagan

  Responsibility, Thinking, Animal

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• Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fate, Evil, Matter

  "Fatum und Geschichte" by Friedrich Nietzsche, April 1862.

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• If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

  C. S. Lewis

  War, Thinking, May

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• Not all of life's roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Men, Mind, May

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• The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

  Max Planck

  Science, Foundation, Essentials

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• It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.

  Ayn Rand

  Achievement, Lucky, Rotten

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.551, Penguin

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• I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

  Michelangelo

  Artist, Evil, Heaven

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• Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  School, Thinking, Acting

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• An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.

  Jon Meacham

  Rejection, Mind, Liberty

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• Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Heaven, Soul, Hell

  Charles H. Spurgeon (2012). “The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858: Unabridged Sermons In Modern Language”, p.1783, New Leaf Publishing Group

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• The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.

  Bertrand Russell

  Law, Dynamics, Matter

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• Remove grace, and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved.

  Anselm of Canterbury

  Grace, Remove, Canterbury

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• Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Choices, Courses

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• A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

  Aldous Huxley

  Freedom, Food, Optimistic

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

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• One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Inspirational, Believe, Responsibility

  "Housewives, Sure, but What Makes Them Real?" by Neil Genzlinger, www.nytimes.com. May 15, 2011.

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• Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

  George MacDonald

  Lying, Liberty, Likes

  George Macdonald (1870). “The Miracles of Our Lord”, p.56

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