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"What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?"
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Exlpore more Determinism quotes
"The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine."
"Believe it or not, the notions of free will and destiny are not mutually exclusive.Predestination is the universal framework of limits (based on natural physical laws) placed upon us.Free will is our infinite ability to make choices within that framework.Because the universal scale is so great-and most of it constitutes an undiscovered frontier-our choices are only limited by our knowledge, our abilities, and our imagination.To put it simply, the world is such a huge playground sandbox that we will never run out of sand or reach the faraway safety fence of destiny.So go out there and play!"
"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
"...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?"
"The present is the necessary product of all the past the necessary cause of all the future."
"The only thing God is afraid of is a strong-willed human!"
"What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?"
Explore more quotes by Sam Harris
"Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering."
"120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer."
"That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else."
"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."
"To point out nonepistemic motives in another's view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person's connection to the world as it is."
"We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence."
"As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?"
"It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend-about what, I don't recall-and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes."
"What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives."
"Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality."
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