Top 100 Quotes About Determinism
#1. Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.
Eric Chaisson
#2. When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.
Michel Houellebecq
#3. The concept of Free Will makes no sense unless associated, somehow or the other, with Absolute Determinism; it is just as a man cannot walk without gravity arresting and spurring his pace simultaneously.
Raheel Farooq
#4. Can't you see there's a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.
Malcolm Lowry
#5. The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
Max Planck
#6. The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.
Heinz R. Pagels
#7. The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.
Ken MacLeod
#8. The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.
T.C. Boyle
#9. Rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for "connections" in nature than for causal laws (determinism).
M.L. Von Franz
#10. Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#11. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#12. Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism ...
Eric Chaisson
#13. History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
Bernard DeVoto
#14. I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
Freeman Dyson
#15. The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures.
Eric Chaisson
#16. No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do
not control temperature.
Robert Nozick
#17. In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
Susan Griffin
#18. The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur.
Richard C. Lewontin
#19. For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
Jared Diamond
#20. Determinism gives you the freedom to do whatever you like.
Raheel Farooq
#21. I find it significant that, even though contemporary philosophy tends towards forms of determinism, in the wider culture people are deeply into naming, shaming and blaming each other. So we haven't lost that sense of conscience.
John Cornwell
#22. Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism ?
Simon Blackburn
#23. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton
#24. All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Marcel Duchamp
#25. The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.
Ilya Prigogine
#26. Free will, determinism, meaning, existence, etc. are academic problems, not problems in life.
Marty Rubin
#27. In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion, but, rather, our culture's newfound faith - science - that challenges the belief in free will.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#28. Materialists thereby deny the reality of mind (while they use their minds to advance materialism), determinists deny the reality of human choice (while they choose determinism), and relativists deny the fact of right and wrong (while they judge you if you disagree).
Nancy Pearcey
#29. To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
Joan Didion
#30. The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.
Margaret Mead
#31. History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
Charles De Gaulle
#32. In The Craft the clockwork God of Newtonian determinism has been replaced by the quantum-aware Great Architect who is ready and willing to allow us to contribute to His malleable Plan for the cosmos.
Robert Lomas
#33. It is ironic that a movement that made its reputation championing the irrelevance of biological differences when those differences were to most women's disadvantage immediately returned to biological determinism when those differences were to the most women's advantage.
Warren Farrell
#34. Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.
Rene Magritte
#35. Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
Aldo Leopold
#36. Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science.
Claude Bernard
#37. I do not accept history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century.
Paulo Freire
#38. It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#39. 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.
James Gleick
#40. Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.
Glen Duncan
#41. [C]ontingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. Eventually the United States became the latter arsenal and bank of the allies, and acquired a direct interest in allied victory that was to bemuse the post war apostles of economic determinism for a long time.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#43. When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation.
Stephen Covey
#44. [The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
G.K. Chesterton
#45. Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
Matt Ridley
#46. Too often we shape our public positions on the basis of our economic connections. That brings us dangerously close to economic determinism.
George W. Romney
#47. Many of us think in terms in parental determinism: 'If I push all the right buttons my kids are going to turn out OK.' I want to instill in myself and my people a wonderful dose, not of carelessness, but of God's sovereignty. He knows the hairs on your kids' heads.
Kevin DeYoung
#48. Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.
Stephen Jay Gould
#49. Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
Harold Rosenberg
#50. Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.
David Foster Wallace
#51. The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#52. Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#53. The illusion of free will is straining under the weight of determinism.
Robert Kroese
#54. Life is like a game of cards.
The hand you are dealt is determinism;
The way you play it is free will.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#55. A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values?
William Greider
#56. There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#57. A world in which the choices we make do not finally matter, because our wills are already fixed beneath the weight of a crushing determinism, is not a human world.
William Shakespeare
#58. And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.
Rebecca Goldstein
#59. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#60. The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.
Ted Chiang
#61. Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#62. To talk of probability is to suggest that events might happen differently from the way they do, whereas events themselves will unfold according to an inevitable path.
Johnny Rich
#63. Freedom is inevitable; it is only the matter of the form in which it occurs. I think it is not the freedom per se that matters but the capacity to absorb it. I could have it and yet not enjoy it.
Aporva Kala
#64. He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing
Johnny Rich
#65. You can't change the past. You can't even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.
Larry Wall
#66. [L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
Stephen King
#67. Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.
Vladimir I. Vernadsky
#68. Our desires are guided by what we believe to be good or bad; our beliefs are directed by our knowledge; our knowledge, in turn, is again a manipulation of our desires. Our Will, during this inexorable revolution, serves as the force, increasing, decreasing, or at worst, maintaining the pace.
Raheel Farooq
#69. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.
James Joyce
#70. Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.
Johnny Rich
#71. You is not you until you see the path of your faith.
Lena Hussain
#73. Classical mechanics gave us a deterministic view of the world. Quantum mechanics, conversely, gives us a probabilistic view instead. According to Newton, if you know the cause af an event, you can predict the outcome. According to M.Born, you can only predict how likely that outcome will be.
Leonid V. Azaroff
#75. The future is certain. It is just not known.
Johnny Rich
#77. There's no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.
Johnny Rich
#79. The universe holds a destiny in store for people who will not build their own, but they seldom like it.
Lance Conrad
#81. Whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding
as it should.
Max Ehrmann
#82. Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.
Nenia Campbell
#83. What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels
#84. Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.
Joe Abercrombie
#85. Cleverness have no meanings until you find the stupidity that teach you.
Lena Hussain
#87. They say your hardcore's not yours, and it's not fate. Nobody's gonna tell you what shit like that means.
Noah Wareness
#88. If being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like
Zeno Of Citium
#89. Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.
Andrew Ferguson
#91. Genes do not make you, any more than brain chemistry makes you hungry, food makes you breathe, breathing makes you die.
Johnny Rich
#92. Destiny is always a doorstep away, if we know to move in the right direction.
Hari Kumar K
#93. My destiny plays with me in such a way
I feel I play with my destiny.
Vivake Pathak
#94. You're all incredibly thoughtful souls who keep my head attached to my body.
Jenny Sampirisi
#95. It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
Jorge Luis Borges
#96. This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?
Max Planck
#97. There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.
Ulysses S. Grant
#98. The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.
Corliss Lamont
#99. There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
