Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

The world is independent of my will.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

Man is condemned to be free.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

As does every young man studying philosophy, I naturally asked myself questions about the truth of all this, and about the meaning of freedom, predestination, and liberty of choice and so on. But to have asked questions of yourself about it, I think is not too important. Let's say - I remain - I remained a believer.

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.

The apprehension of necessity is an imitation of creation.

If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

Free will...it's all the rage these days

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.

I suppose that the great questions of "Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute," which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled.