Harry Frankfurt Quotes

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.

Implicit in true freedom of spirit lies a proud and virile will. Such glorious power of free will to choose, envisages beneficent social responsibility as manifest and welcome.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Freedom requires responsibility to choose who we are above and beyond our immediate impulses, needs, and social pressures, so that we can genuinely express the type of person we want to be, live the life we truly want to live, leave the legacy we desire.

A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.

He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.

The real key is to live in an environment where the mind feels free to choose the right thing instead of being compelled by habit and inertia to choose the wrong thing.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

No one makes me do anything I don't want to do.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

What, in the end, is freedom but the ability to choose?

I can't force myself to do anything I don't wanna do, really. I never have.

The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.

A true man does what he will, not what he must.

That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.