Thomas Frank Quotes

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

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

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

Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.

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

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I mean, actual freedom is a very abstract notion; we have no idea what it means, except within a context - freedom to do what? So within these social structures, freedom becomes defined as power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

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?

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn't mean we decide anything.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

It isn't that we do what we want. It's that we're allowed to want at all.

He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Freedom means the capability to say yes when yes is needed, to say no when no is needed, and sometimes to keep quiet when nothing is needed - to be silent, not to say anything. When all these dimensions are available, there is freedom.

The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.