The thoughts of a prisoner—they’re not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on...

What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) – but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have...

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

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School...

It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant...

Determinism gives you the freedom to do whatever you like.

In my opinion and to the best of my understanding, free-will and pre-determination are two distinctly different economies that are ‘operationally co-existent'”.

The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place.Or, at least not yet again.As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility.

When you learn to say ‘NO’, you activate the faculty of ‘CHOICE’ in your mind ! Some of the times you are the chosen one..at other times you CHOOSE for yourself..and saying NO is a sign that one has graduated into becoming a wise CHOICEMAKER ……

Sure, the outcome was favourable, but what was the cost? Wasn’t changing the way she felt about something not far from taking away her free will altogether?

The art of making True promises within ones ownself is termed as Will (Sankalp)… for beginners (like me) it is a tough learning and for siddhas; they just become that way… effortlessly they sail…

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe....

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made...

If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.

In physics, yes. In people, no.

So many roads. So many detours. So many choices. So many mistakes.

Free-will doesn’t include shit-happens,unless that’s the goal of one’s intention.

If there’s to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.

Peace adores above everything free discussion and expression without intimidation.

When our thoughts, at times, wander into darkness… remember we are human and have been imbued with free will to choose the light.

I’m convinced that most men don’t know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man’s atrocities, but wouldn’t dream of imprisoning a mother for her son’s crime?

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

These were people who hunted for a way to erase the haunted, malnourished gaze from their souls and replace it with their faith in freedom and safety.

Harry, life isn’t simple. There is such a thing as black and white. Right and wrong. But when you’re in the thick of things, sometimes it’s hard for us to tell. You didn’t do what you did for your own benefit. You did it so that you could protect others. That doesn’t make it right...

If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.

Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve’s innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice – the very worst – but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she...

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I...

I’ve been coerced into free will.

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To...

It’s not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That’s how we’re built, that’s how every Partial is wired – to follow orders and trust in our leaders – but it’s not enough. It never has been. We’ve followed our leaders, and sometimes they...

There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

…your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will…

Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under...

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.

An apparent misfortune of man is that neither good nor evil is an agency itself; both are equally passive choices. Man himself is the ultimate agency. He has the power to realize and activate the dead options. Only then, that is, by the action of Will, good results in good and evil in evil.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I’ll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but...

Life is the sum of habits, only occasionally disturbed by a thought.

Unless you realize that there is a sun beyond comprehension of this limited mind… the life shall remain confined within a Box…

A motto of the human race: Let me do as I like, and give me approval as well.

People can’t change. We’re pre-programmed robots going through the motions. We’re the same at death as we are at birth.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for...

He who let’s the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

The true free-will ain’t a matter of choosing one of many choices…but of creating variety of options, then deciding the best choice of all.

. . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done.