Quotes About Free will

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

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

God seldom suspends the laws of nature, just as God does not remove free will to keep evil people from doing evil things.

Our ideal of the future is that she should continue to render that service of her own free will.

What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?

For the one belief we all carry with us, no matter how rational we claim to be, is a belief in our own free will.

Some folk have to react against something: parents, siblings, government, society. They think they have free will, when all they doing is wilfully opposing.

Culture gives opportunity. It does not take away the free will of the individual. That would be a violation of God's design.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

The entire point of life was the ability to make one's own choices. Foreknowledge of anything—especially the circular kind, such as Kashkari's presence at Eton because he'd dreamed of it—was terribly limiting and ran counter to the concept of free will.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

LOVE comes of its own free will, it can't be learned in any school!

I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to consider one scenario more likely than the other.

Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?

The implication of the free-will doctrine are not realized by those who hold it. We say "why did you do it?" and expect the answer to mention beliefs and desires which caused action. When a man does not himself know why he acted as he did, we may search his unconscious for a cause, but it never occurs to us that there may have been no cause.

Choose for yourselves today the one you will worship. Joshua 24:15

What husband is he who abandons his wife? What wife is she taken without love? The gods demand of us action and the use of our free will! That is piety, not to buckle beneath necessity's yoke like dumb beasts!

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.

I do not believe any power can possess the mind of a man or woman... I believe in God-given free will, you see. I think nothing is forced on us, except by other people like ourselves. I think our choices are our own.

We make our own destiny.

History treats time as a chain of happenings that we humans set into motion by our own free will; its first lesson is that a first cause does not exist because, as my teachers put it back in public-school, we learn history in order to learn how to change it.

And though it would never be publicly admitted, they must also be brainwashed to adopt his ideology. Pure by blood, stripped of free will, they were going to make Germany great again.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

Counterfactuals are the building blocks of moral behavior as well as scientific thought. The ability to reflect on one's past actions and envision alternative scenarios is the basis of free will and social responsibility. The algorithmization of counterfactuals invites thinking machines to benefit from this ability and participate in this (until now) uniquely human way of thinking about the world.