quotations about free will
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character. Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of your practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think -- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.
ROB BELL
Love Wins
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
LEO TOLSTOY
War and Peace
If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it.
OTTO WEININGER
Collected Aphorisms
What we really mean by free will ... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them ... the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Cities of the Plain
In historical events great men--so-called--are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
LEO TOLSTOY
War and Peace
There is also a Darwinian reason that we believe in free will: A society in which the individual feels responsible for his or her actions is more likely to work together and survive to spread its values.
STEPHEN HAWKING
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
NEIL GAIMAN
Anansi Boys
If free will truly is the cornerstone of God's design, then we must ask ourselves why we are struggling so much to harness what God hopes will bring us into union with others -- and, more importantly, with God himself.
JIM SCHROEDER
"The Failure of Free Will in Men", National Catholic Register, June 14, 2019
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
TED CHIANG
Stories of Your Life and Others
Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like [are] delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.
CLARENCE DARROW
Darrow for the Defence
Free will has to be taken.
MARK LAWRENCE
Prince of Thorns
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Essays and Aphorisms
I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!
RAYMOND SMULLYAN
Is God a Taoist?
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
The Fountainhead
I got a free will that I ain't even used yet
I got a free will and I ain't gonna use it
'til I know what I'm doing
UTOPIA
"Itch in My Brain", Oblivion
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
Rolling Stone, Nov. 1989
No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made.
J.D. STROUBE
Caged in Darkness
God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -- of creatures that worked like machines -- would hardly be worth creating.
C.S. LEWIS
The Case for Christianity