Free Will

(162 votes)   The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
1844-1900, German Philosopher

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(128 votes)   We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'Tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

William Shakespeare
1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(127 votes)   Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed.

Thomas Jefferson
1743-1826, Third President of the USA

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(114 votes)   The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.

Jean Baudrillard
French Postmodern Philosopher, Writer

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(113 votes)   A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.

Barbara Ehrenreich
1941-, American Author, Columnist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(100 votes)   The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908-, American Economist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(91 votes)   Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.

Herbert Marcuse
1898-1979, German Political Philosopher

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(89 votes)   We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.

Joseph De Maistre
1753-1821, French Diplomat, Philosopher

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(87 votes)   It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.

Joseph De Maistre
1753-1821, French Diplomat, Philosopher

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(87 votes)   The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

Walter Bagehot
1826-1877, British Economist, Critic

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(79 votes)   Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.

Joseph A. Schumpeter
1883-1950, Austrian-American Economist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(75 votes)   We Asians are the original Conservatives because for thousands of years we have believed in free enterprise… you have just stolen our philosophy.

Jayvantsinnji Gohel
1915-1995, Chairman of the Anglo-Asian Conservative Society

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(74 votes)   In the long run, free trade benefits everyone; in the short run it is bound to produce much pain.

Henry Hobhouse
British Writer

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(72 votes)   Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is ''All striving is vain,'' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

William James
1842-1910, American Psychologist, Professor, Author

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(72 votes)   One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

P. J. O'Rourke
1947-, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website