Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

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

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

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

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

Man is condemned to be free.

This is plainly to ascribe divinity to 'free will.'

Choice is destiny's soul mate.

Neither divine grace nor natural knowledge ever diminishes freedom.

As does every young man studying philosophy, I naturally asked myself questions about the truth of all this, and about the meaning of freedom, predestination, and liberty of choice and so on. But to have asked questions of yourself about it, I think is not too important. Let's say - I remain - I remained a believer.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.

It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

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

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.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.

We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.