Dean Koontz Quotes

Free will I have often heard of, but I have never seen it. I have always met with will, and plenty of it, but it has either been led captive by sin or held in the blessed bonds of grace.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Free will...it's all the rage these days

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

It is our decisions not our conditions that determine our quality of life.

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

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

Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

I believe we've been given free will, and we can take responsibility for our own lives and for creating our own environments - which I think at times can be a little much for people to deal with.

Each human being has been granted a virtue: the capacity to choose. For he who does not use this virtue, it becomes a curse - and others will always choose for him.

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.

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

He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

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.