Quotes About Agency

He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice.

Que as pernas também são pessoas, apenas inferiores aos braços, e valem de si mesmas, quando a cabeça não as rege por meio de idéias. As minhas chegaram ao pé do muro.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

There are no victims in life, we are all volunteers. Our decisions create our experiences.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

Bill McKibben wrote, 'We live in a post-natural world.' But did 'Nature' in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

If you didn't have a choice, you have to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let the world happen to you.

You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.15 You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

You can do what you decide to do-but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

Agency. Self-determination. Dignity. Solidarity. We could not discount the potential impact of even one such altered perspective on a young girl, her family, and, eventually, on an entire community.

Individuals within the institution must act as if the decision has been made for it to be made. If they do not, it has not. A

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.

Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.

Our choices lie between the lesser of two evils, but it is still within our power to make these choices

Caro mio, sono un uomo finito: ella può far di me ciò che vuole.

We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

but all I did was pray to the Lord and ask for some guidance and direction in connection with the decision that I'd reached. A more perfect thing to have done would have been to counsel with him relative to the decision and get a spiritual confirmation that the conclusion, which I by my agency and faculties had arrived at, was the right one. ("Agency or Inspiration?" New Era, January 1975, p. 40)

I feel that I am merely an agent, giving you some keys that have been given to me to pass on to you. These keys are to unlock doors out of your present prison. Doors opening onto new vistas. Doors beyond where you are now.

Those whom the Lord favours not with the direction of his Spirit, he, by a righteous judgement, consigns to the agency of Satan.

pois nas mulheres, e em particular nas do nosso tipo, por melhor que seja a disposição dos nossos corações, há sempre uma parte rainha que se autogoverna e que tem suas próprias razões de Estado, e dentre estas a mais forte é a que manda jamais se confundir a vontade com o ato.

The causes of evil karma are greed, anger, and ignorance—the three poisons. We create karma through action, by what we do with our body, words, and thoughts. In atoning we take full and unequivocal responsibility for it all. When we do that, we empower ourself. It becomes our evil karma, not someone else's. We acknowledge ourself as an active agent, not a passive victim. We begin to recognize that our life is not just something that happens to us.

we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.