Dennis Lehane Quotes

Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.

Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human.

You are free to choose. You are not free not to choose. No choice is a choice. You are free to choose but you are not free to choose the consequences of that choice.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

A human being is a deciding being.

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

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Ultimately the person, even the child, must choose for himself.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

Everything you do is by choice. It may not seem so, but it is.

But man is freer than all the animals, on account of his free-will, with which he is endowed above all other animals.

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.