Sam Harris Quotes

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

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.

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?

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.

His will cannot be neutral or 'free' to act contrary to his nature.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The neutral view of free will is impossible. It involves choice without desire.

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention.

Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.

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

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.

If the effort also is predestined, it is not the less our effort, made of our free will.

But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science.

The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

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

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

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

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!

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.

Let that ethical philosophy therefore of free-will be far from a Christian mind.