Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.

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

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

I wonder whether being a scientist's daughter makes you so conflicted about free will and fate.

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

I don't believe in luck. I believe everything happens for a reason.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.

I detest that saying 'Everything happens for a reason'; it's nonsense.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

I believe in fate.

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.

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.

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.

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

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

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

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.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

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.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.