Inescapable Consequences Quotes

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please …. All history is the record of man’s signal failure to thwart his destiny.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.

There is no armor against fate.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can't help it. We're made by the events of our past, so there's no escaping it.

He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

He had no one but himself to blame, for he’d opened himself up to it. Just a fraction at first, like a crack in a window. But the funny thing was, once you welcomed in a breeze, there was no stopping what came next. A wind, a storm, thunder and lightning, until you could no longer reach the window to close it—and didn’t really want to anyway. That’s what this new darkness was. Evil in its purest form... -Paris