Determinism Quotes

“You know, I have always believed that humans do have some amount of free will. Of course, this free will is absent if your bladder is full or if you want to rush to the toilet to have a dump. But once things are normal, a certain amount of leeway does exist.”
― Abhaidev, The World's Most Frustrated Man

“You would absolve your Gods of guilt?” Tariq said, sounding surprised.

“You would absolve humanity of responsibility?” Amadeus asked, scornful. “The deferral of consequence to higher power is the deepest form of moral cowardice conceivable. Even your precious Book agrees, Pilgrim – we have a choice.”
― ErraticErrata, A Practical Guide to Evil V

“Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“We are being inexorably drawn in by a Final cause – the Omega Point – divinity. Divinity = perfect symmetry = the total, flawless alignment of every monad in the Singularity, which equates to the resetting of every monad and the end of a cosmic cycle. This is the moment of Divine Suicide – when all the Gods die. This is Ragnarok. This is Götterdammerung. All the gods must perish. Each cyclical universe must die. Scientists talk of the Heat Death brought about by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There’s simply no way out.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“But still, two times two is four is a most obnoxious thing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Every person is a puppet who didn't pick his own strings and those strings reach back to the big bang.”
― Sam Harris, Making Sense

“You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essay on the Freedom of the Will

“Could the completed life course of such a man turn out in any respect, even the smallest, in any happening, any scene, differently from the way it did? – No! is the consistent and correct answer.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“We should rather consider the events, as they happen, with the same eye as we consider the printed word which we read, knowing full well that it was there before we read it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essay on the Freedom of the Will

“You have not built your mind. And in moments in which you seem to build it—when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill—the only tools at your disposal are those that you have inherited from moments past.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter—and there are paths toward making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back and forth between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands
independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal
punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Whether it is useful to emphasize the punishment of certain criminals—rather than their containment or rehabilitation—is a question for social and psychological science. But it seems clear that a desire for retribution, arising from the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion—and perpetuates a moral one.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“What led you to write a graduate thesis on the subject of the imagination?
SARTRE: I suppose that at that period of my life I had some ideas about the image I refer to the time when I was at L'Ecole normale—and later I had the feeling that that was the first thing I ought to do. The idea that sensation was not identical to the image, that the image was not sensation renewed. That was something I felt in myself. It is bound up with the freedom of consciousness since, when the conscious mind imagines, it disengages itself from what is real in order to look for something that isn't there or that doesn't exist. And it was this passage into the imaginary that helped me understand what freedom is. For instance, if one person asks another: "Where is your friend Pierre?" and it turns out that he's in Berlin, for example, that person will picture where his friend Pierre is. There is a disconnection of thought that cannot be explained by determinism. Determinism cannot move to the plane of the imaginary. If it's a fact, it will create a fact.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre by himself: A film directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon

“On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.”
― J. Doyne Farmer

“Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for a belief in historical determination and permanence: [Erich From wrote,] 'It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. ... The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation - and creation is always a miracle - is outside his range of emotional experience.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“You yourself are a soul. And that’s exactly why you are free. No machine can ever be free. Nothing born in time can be free. You may think that you yourself were born in time, but you weren’t. Your body was created at a specific time, but not your soul. Your soul was never created at all and doesn’t exist in time. It’s eternal.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“Logically, there is nothing in Buddhism that possess free will. If all ingredients in Buddhism are non-Selves that participate in an elaborate system of karmic determinism, then, just as with scientific atoms and the scientific forces that act on these atoms, there is no agent that has free will, hence no agent that can break out of this system (i.e. to attain "enlightenment"). Just as it is absurd for a scientific materialist to claim that a bunch of atoms under the direction of atomic forces could ever become "enlightened" (what could such an assertion possibly mean in relation to atoms and atomic forces?), so it is surely every bit as absurd for Buddhists to claim that non-Self entities and processes under the karmic law of "cause and effect" ever become "enlightened.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Si todo ha sido programado, nada puede obedecer a la casualidad.”
― J.J. Benítez

“That is to say that at the heart of existence is that double negation, “one can not, not.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“J'ai peur de ne pas y arriver. J'ai peur de reproduire les choses, ou qu'elles se reproduisent malgré moi, comme une malédiction, une fatalité, quelque chose qui serait là, dans l'ombre, dans les souvenirs, dans le sang, dans l'histoire du monde, quelque chose contre quoi on ne peut rien.”
― Delphine de Vigan (author)

“There's no spring in his step. No smile on his face. There's just a grim determination, grown strong over the years due to the weight of its burden.”
― Shawn P. McCarthy

“A superficial understanding of science can lead to the assumption that the universe plays out like clockwork. As if the initial conditions were set up in the beginning, then someone hit the go button and everything since has followed in a predetermined manner. This again, is a mechanistic view. Those who make this assumption, without realizing it, are modelling the universe as a machine, as if there were nothing more to it than the straight forward Newtonian mechanisms of clockwork. They assume reality to be nothing but a cascade of atoms bumping into one another like a line of dominoes falling eternally in what could be called ‘the billiard ball model’ of reality.”
― Jax Pax, Existential Questions

“This new environmental determinism (as, for instance, preached by John Dewey and his behaviorist forerunners) is an even more evil invention than Calvin's doctrine concerning predestination. Environment is merely a factor, an influence exercised on the human free will, but not a fatal and coercive power.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of The Herd: Or, Procrustes at Large

“It's politics. You are angry with politics. I understand that. Truly, I do. As powerful as I am, where I come from I am considered a third-tier being. The lords and the royals—some of whom know nothing of the horrors and hardships of war—reign over me. It angers me to no end, and yet I continue. I follow. I do what I must. I do what I have to. I follow the path laid out in front of me. I do my duty.”

“Then how are you any different from the slaves?”

“We are all slaves, whether we want to accept it or not. It's finding higher meaning in the process of servitude where we find relief.”
― Steven Seril, The Destroyer of Worlds: An Answer to Every Question

“We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone's creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.”
― David Graeber, David Wengrow

“It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable. There's is no way to know. So precisely where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste.”
― David Graeber, David Wengrow

“There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.’
A king is history’s slave.
History, that is, the unconscious, general, swarm-life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace