Sharmila Tagore Quotes

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

We all have to take responsibility for what we say and do.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

Our rulers do wrong from choice and right from necessity.

The American people cannot be driven to do anything that they do not want to do. The way to promote happiness is by moral suasion and not by force.

Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.

Commitment cannot be mandated; it can only be invited.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

Well you don’t have to do it.

It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion.

I respect every guy that has walked away. I think every single guy in this league makes his own decision, and that's perfectly fine. The reason I respect that and the reason I think every guy has his own way of dealing with things is because, in my personal opinion, I know what I'm getting into.

All sin and all crime comes from the same thing: 'I decided. I decided this was okay.'

You cannot make a person want to fight.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?

No enduring improvement can occur without righteous exercise of agency. Do not attempt to override agency. The Lord himself would not do that. Forced obedience yields no blessings.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

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!

We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.