Rick Yancey Quotes

There's always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn't mean there isn't a choice.

Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.

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.

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.

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

Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.

Only when he voluntarily chooses that which he inexorably must do, has man any free will at all.

Choice is the keynote of self-determinism. To determine anything, you must have the choice to determine. Choice to determine means that you must have the power of decision. Decision and time have a lot in common. When we have clean, clear decision, we have clean, clear time. And when we have indecision, there is an unclarity about time.

The choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determines who we are

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.

As I get older, I think that things have been pre-determined for me, whether I liked it or wanted it, wished for it, whatever, way before in some way. And with others, you do have a choice that you can change. And that choice that you make is still part of this grand scheme.

People are born in a certain place, and in a certain society. I don't mean to sound like a determinist, but to think we're entirely free to do whatever we want betrays a certain class perspective. For most people who have to work for a living, and work at jobs under conditions they may not like, it's just not simple when it comes to freedom.

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

Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.

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

I think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?

Free will is something that people struggle with so much, but it's very simple to me. Carl Jung said at the same moment you're a protagonist in your own life making choices, you also are the spear carrier, or the extra, in a much larger drama. You've got to live with these two opposite ideas at the same time.

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.

When it comes to individual destiny, there is no power greater in the universe then the conviction of the human soul to make a choice.

Life is full of choices, but you never get any!

There is always a choice, even if the alternatives don't appear to be equal.

It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.