Peter Kreeft Quotes

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

One who is allowed to sin, sins less

You are to do the choosing here and now during this exciting and wonderful time on earth. Moral agency, the freedom to choose, is certainly one of God's greatest gifts next to life itself. We have the honorable right to choose; therefore, we need to choose the right. This is not always easy.

There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.

Wrong is wrong only when you are at liberty to choose.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

The greatest gift God gave us is also our greatest curse, which is the free will. We are made in God's image, the Bible says, which means we have the ability to love him or not love him, to reject him or not reject him.

Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will.

I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.

While early childhood experiences may impel, they do not compel. In the end, evil is a matter of choice.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder.

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

This is plainly to ascribe divinity to 'free will.'

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.

We have freedom to do good or evil; yet to make choice of evil, is not to use, but to abuse our freedom.

Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.

The will is truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.

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

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

The apple which tempts my characters is the one that will remove the knowledge of good and evil. I suppose it's something of a reversal of the conventional Eden story: Freedom of thought is perhaps the greatest good, and needs to be fought for and sacrificed for.