Free - Quotes
If love [...] is the reason for being moral, what relevance does the existence or non-existence of a deity have? Why can we not be prompted to the ethical life by our own charitable feelings? The existence of a god adds nothing to our moral situation, other than an invisible policeman who sees what we do (even in privacy and under cover of night), and a threat of post-mortem terrors if we misbehave. Such additions are hardly an enrichment of the moral life, since the underpinning they offer consists of fear and threats of punishment: which is exactly what, among other things, the moral life seeks to free us from.
I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. [...] The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took.
Artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
We are free to interpret and reinterpret the meaning of our lives. You can consider your first marriage, which ended in divorce, to be a "failure," or you can view it as a circumstance that caused you to grow in ways that were crucial to your future happiness.
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.
If determinism is true, the future is set - and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism - quantum or otherwise - we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.
Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises.
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Ice is only water, so it must have rainbows in it too. When the water freezes, the rainbows are trapped in it, like fish in a shallow pool. And the sunlight sets them free.
Most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.
Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.
The measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy.