Human Agency Quotes

In history, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet someone planned it.

It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.

We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.

Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, ... Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Only the people can build world history.

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

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.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

I was angry but not at God. I feel that you are closer to God when you are messed up. Definitely. That's when you most need God, and God cannot control what man does.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

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

God made man to be free. Anybody can do whatever they want.