Leo Tolstoy Quotes

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

… history turns out as always to be too messy, contingent and subject to the vagaries of human agency to be slotted into neat boxes.

History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

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.

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

...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.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.

if reason ruled the world would history even exist?

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

You believe in a God who plays dice, I in complete law and order.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.

Accident is veiled necessity.

Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions; do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.