I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.Thomas Stearns Eliot (T. S.)
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Fifth Theory.—This is our theory, or that of our Law. ...The theory of man's perfectly free will is one of the fundamental principles of the Law of our teacher Moses, and of those who follow the Law. According to this principle man does what is in his power to do, by his nature, his choice, and his will; and his action is not due to any faculty created for the purpose. All species of irrational animals likewise move by their own free will. This is the Will of God; that is to say, it is due to the eternal divine will that all living beings should move freely, and that man should have the power to act according to his will or choice within the limits of his capacity.
Maimonides
I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. … You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. … Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action.
Georges Bataille
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance.
Friedrich Schelling
No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
John Kenneth Galbraith
“A professor, as the German saying has it, is a man who thinks otherwise. Now an able and otherwise-thinking president [or Dean of Faculty], surrounded by able and otherwise-thinking professors, each resolutely thinking otherwise in his own manner, each astounded to find that the others, excellent fellows as he knows them in the main to be, so often refuse in matters of the highest import to be informed by knowledge or guided by reason [you’ve seen this happen]?this is indeed always an arresting spectacle and may indeed sometimes seem to be a futile performance. Yet it is not futile unless great universities are futile.”
Carl Becker
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (T. S.)
Elizabeth I of England
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