Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

He [Karl Marx] forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.

I'm a card-carrying existentialist.

I have my choice: who can wish for more? Free will enables us to do everything well while imposition makes a light burden heavy.

But now I wonder--what if everyone is pretty much the same and it's just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it's some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day,making the best choices we can. The thought is horrifying. If that's true, then there's no right choice. There's only choice.

Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.

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

[Liberty] is freedom of choice, a divine gift, an essential virtue in a peaceful society.

You are always free to choose what you do first, what you do second, and what you do not do at all

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.

In short, my vision of a responsible free society is one in which we discourage evil, but do not prohibit it. We make our children and students aware of the consequences of drug abuse and other forms of irresponsible behavior. But after all our persuading, if they still want to use harmful drugs, that is their privilege. In a free society, individuals must have the right to do right or wrong, as long as they don't threaten or infringe upon the rights or property of others. They must also suffer the consequences of their actions, as it is from consequences that they learn to choose properly

There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape .... have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority .... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader.

The natural state of man is to want to be free. To have opportunities. To have choices.

To have a choice at all is to be free - even when the choice is between two terrible things.

Fear is only good when you have a choice in things.

It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake - for in some cases it is a mistake.

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?

Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.

Listen,' he said. 'It's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.

What I'm really interested in is freedom.

Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide