Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

No one lives like a robot. We all make choices from the moment we wake up in the morning.

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

Today there is no greater force in the molding of the North American mind than the invasion of the imagination by the visual media.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want.

All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.

"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

I do hope that young men and women will start to think for themselves and start to take responsibility for their own thoughts.

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

Magazines, books, novels, TV, internet, movies - all of those things is what creates our consciousness.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.

Choice is a signature of our species.

Each person makes their own decision about what it is that is happening, whether they like it or don't like it, whether they want to lend their energy to it or not or what, you know.

Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.

A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon.

The historic idea that the devil tempts men had this remarkable effect, it produced the man of iron who fought; the modern idea of blaming his heredity or his circumstances produces the man who gives in at once.