Desmond Tutu Quotes

I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

God gave us our agency. He taught us a way. He showed us what to do. But he gave us our agency and left us free to act as we choose to do.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives.

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

In reality this is the very reverse of what we are told about the biblical God, who opens up freedom for us, who lets us make our own history, who goes with us on the more or less unheard-of adventures that we concoct.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

...People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

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

When people consent to do something, they should be able to do whatever they want.

The greatest gift God gave us is the power to make decisions.

Without doubt, God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. God directs angels, men, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature: and man having been created free, he is led freely.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

You want to make your own decisions, but you ought to make those decisions with an eternal perspective.

No enduring improvement can occur without righteous exercise of agency. Do not attempt to override agency. The Lord himself would not do that. Forced obedience yields no blessings.

Eve didn't choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent." "Yes," I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. "But...she didn't have to take a bite. She chose to.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.