Self Determinism Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Brian Greene

#3. 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

#4. History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

Bernard DeVoto

#5. Life calls the tune, we dance.

John Galsworthy

#6. 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

#7. Determinists can't help it

Jerry DePyper

#8. Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism ...

Eric Chaisson

#9. 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

#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. You is not you until you see the path of your faith.

Lena Hussain

#12. Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

Johnny Rich

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. [L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.

Stephen King

#20. 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

#21. The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

Heinz R. Pagels

#22. He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing

Johnny Rich

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

Max Planck

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!

Sam Harris

#30. 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