The Evils of Free Will/Quotes

Fire needs no teacher! Flame needs no instruction! Anti-Life justifies my ignorance! Life is a question. Anti-Life is the answer.

—Black Lightning, Final Crisis: Submit

Awareness of self is no miracle, Eleanor... it is a trick of the gene, an endless inner refrain, asking: "What's in it for me?" To serve the world, we must grow deaf to the self.

—Dr. Sofia Lamb, BioShock (series) 2

Jasmine: There are no absolutes. No right and wrong. Haven't you learned anything working for the Powers? There are only choices. I offered Paradise. You chose this!
Angel: Because I could. Because that's what you took away from us. Choice.
Jasmine: And look where free will has gotten you.
Angel: Hey, I didn't say we were smart. I said it's our right. It's what makes us human.
Jasmine: But you're NOT human!

Angel:...Working on it.

—Angel, "Peace Out"

With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them.

—The Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov

We're not telling people what to think. We're just going to teach them how.

—Serenity

Free will is overrated.

—Yahtzee

People with beliefs like that usually have a disorder that prevents them from understanding loyalty to anything but their own desires. A defect in their lateral cortex makes them abnormally egocentric, and the same disorder keeps them from having any impulse control. I learned about it in socio-deviance.

—Kalisi Reyar (Cardassian student), Terok Nor.

Norris: What happened to free will?
Thompson: We actually tried free will before. After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire, we stepped back to see how you'd do on your own. You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries until finally we decided we should come back in. The Chairman thought that maybe we just needed to do a better job with teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training wheels off again. So we gave you the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. For six hundred years, we taught you to control your impulses with reason. Then in 1910, we stepped back again. Within fifty years, you'd brought us World War I, the Depression, fascism, the Holocaust, and capped it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, a decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn't fix. You don't have free will, David. You have the appearance of free will.
Norris: You expect me to believe that? I make decisions everyday.
Thompson: You have free will over which toothpaste you use or which beverage to order at lunch, but humanity just isn't mature enough to control the important things.
Norris: So you handle the important things. Well the last time I checked, the world's a pretty screwed up place.

Thompson: It's still here. If we'd left things in your hands, it wouldn't be.

—The Adjustment Bureau