A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.

I was predestined to be an Arminian. I became a Calvinist of my own free will.

Have you ever met a Calvinist who did not think that he was one of the elect?

Human behavior, suggested Greg Carey, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado, could be compared to lemonade. It's a mixture of water, lemon and sugar, and it's meaningless to ask which is most important. "Nature vs. nurture should have died a long time ago," he said.

Any contrasting of heredity with environment which presents one as more important than the other is completely meaningless. What we are depends 100 per cent on our heredity and also 100 per cent on our environment; change either and we are changed. Any attempt to make one more important than the other is as silly as trying to determine which is the more important in deriving a product, the multiplicand or the multiplier.

Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free." -- "President Andrew Shepard,"

"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty."

There is an old story told by Jewish Rabbis. It tells of a man in a boat full of people, drilling a hole in the bottom underneath his seat. The Captain tries to stop him, by telling him that if he makes a hole the boat will sink and they will all drown. 'But,' the man replies, 'it is my own seat; I can do whatever I like under my seat.'

In an old Christian song titled "Hornets", the verses recount the stories of Jonah, Moses, and Balaam, and how God got them to say or do what he wanted them to, even though they were unwilling at first. The song gets its title from a verse that explains how hornets can make a person leave a room, not against their will, but willingly. The chorus goes: He does not compel us to go (no, no) He does not compel us to go He does not compel us to go 'gainst our will But he just makes us willing to go.

New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof chose two Cambodian prostitutes and attempted to buy their freedom from their brothel owners. He selected young women who were there against their will, willing to tell their story, and actually wanted to leave prostitution. The first woman, Srey Neth, was a simple transaction. For $150, Kristof left with the girl and a receipt. Srey Mom's situation proved more difficult, since the brothel owner demanded more money. Kristof writes: After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom's freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back. "Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We've got to get out of here." Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door. With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes—her closest friends—began pleading with her to be reasonable. Even the owner of the brothel begged her to "Grab this chance while you can," but Srey Mom hysterically refused to leave. Srey Mom only stopped crying when Kristov agreed to buy back the cellphone too. Then she asked for her pawned jewelry to be part of the deal. Kristof reflected upon the complex emotions making the decision to leave the brothel so difficult. I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We'll see. Sometimes we may resemble this woman. Though Christ sets us free from sin and death, how often we choose to live in slavery rather than newness of life. Citation: Nicholas Kristof, "Bargaining for Freedom," NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/opinion/21KRIS.html?th (1-21-04); submitted by John Beukema, Western Springs, Illinois

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish. -- Robert Jackson

An Arab chief tells a story of a spy who was captured and then sentenced to death by a general in the Persian army. This general had the strange custom of giving condemned criminals a choice between the firing squad and the big, black door. As the moment for execution drew near, the spy was brought to the Persian general, who asked the question, "What will it be: the firing squad or the big, black door?" The spy hesitated for a long time. It was a difficult decision. He chose the firing squad. Moments later shots rang out confirming his execution. The general turned to his aide and said, "They always prefer the known way to the unknown. It is characteristic of people to be afraid of the undefined. Yet, we gave him a choice." The aide said, "What lies beyond the big door?" "Freedom," replied the general. "I've known only a few brave enough to take it."

There is a mystery about kite-flying that has always intrigued me. When the kite string breaks for some reason, one would think that the kite freed from all restraints would soar higher into the skies. But it doesn't. It starts zigzagging, flipping, and diving. Finally, it crashes into a tree or power line. People react in a similar fashion. That person who claims to be utterly free, to be obligated to nothing or nobody, is almost always a pitiful slave to selfishness. His life usually is a tale of tragedy, ending with a crash. On the other hand, the happiest and most creative people on earth are those who keep a taut line of faith between themselves and God, allowing God to direct and support them. If you would compare yourself to kite, how are you flying these days? (Bill Bouknight, "Just a thought")

Perhaps we do not realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of "divine abdication." -- C. S. Lewis

[on leaving America to join another country] The boldest approach is to start a nation of your own. Sadly, these days it is essentially impossible to buy an uninhabited island and declare it a sovereign nation: virtually every rock above the waterline is now under the jurisdiction of one principality or another. But efforts have been made to build nations on man-made structures or on reefs lying just below the waterline. Among the more successful of these is the famous Principality of Sealand, which was founded in 1967 on an abandoned military platform off the coast of Britain. The following year a British judge ruled that the principality lay outside the nation’s territorial waters. New citizenships in Sealand, however, are not being granted or sold at present. A less fortunate attempt was made in 1972, when Michael Oliver, a Nevada businessman, built an island on a reef 260 miles southwest of Tonga. Hiring a dredger, he piled up sand and mud until he had enough landmass to declare independence for his “Republic of Minerva.” Unfortunately, the Republic of Minerva was soon invaded by a Tongan force, whose number is said to have included a work detail of prisoners, a brass band, and Tonga’s 350-pound king himself. The reef was later officially annexed by the kingdom. More recently, John J. Prisco III, of the Philippines, has declared himself the prince of the Principality of New Pacific, and announced that he has discovered a suitable atoll in the international waters of the Central Pacific. As of publication, the principality has yet to begin the first phase of construction, but it is already accepting applications for citizenship.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/accident/seatbelt.asp Despite the vital role automobile seat belts have played in saving thousands and thousands of lives over the last several decades, there is still a group Buckle up of drivers and passengers who are determined not to wear them, for any number of reasons: because they find them too uncomfortable or confining, because they don't believe in their efficacy, because they've heard that wearing seat belts might actually cost them their lives in certain types of accidents, or because they resent as an unwarranted intrusion of government into private life the plethora of laws now requiring motorists to buckle up. In this vein, we note with a sense of both sadness and irony a couple of articles recently called to our attention. The first is a 17 September 2004 editorial published in the Daily Nebraskan and entitled "Individual Rights Buckle Under Seat Belt Laws," by Derek Kieper, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in which the writer inveighed against mandatory seat belt laws, opining that "Uncle Sam is not here to regulate every facet of life no matter the consequences," and that "Democrats and Republicans alike should stand together to stop these laws that are incongruous with the ideals of both parties." In the midst of his editorial he noted: As laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group. Evidently his words were far more prescient than any of us might have wanted, as an article in the 4 January 2005 Lincoln Journal Star reported that Mr. Kieper not only died in a car crash, but the tragic mishap that claimed his life was the very type of accident in which seat belts have proved so effective in saving lives — preventing passengers from being ejected from vehicles: Derek Kieper was a smart, funny, intense young man who relished a good debate and would do anything for his friends. Kieper, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, died early Tuesday morning when the Ford Explorer he was a passenger in travelled off an icy section of Interstate 80 and rolled several times in a ditch. Kieper, who was riding in the back seat of the Explorer, was ejected from the vehicle. Two others in the vehicle, including the driver, Luke Havermann of Ogallala, and the front-seat passenger, Nick Uphoff of Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, sustained non-life threatening injuries. Havermann and Uphoff, both 21, were being treated at BryanLGH Medical Center West. Derek, who was thrown from the vehicle, was not wearing a seat belt, [Capt. Joe Lefler of the Lancaster County Sheriff's Office] said. He said Havermann and Uphoff were wearing seat belts at the time.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Aldous Huxley's Underlying Motives

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. [my note: At the time he made this remark he had changed his mind - he is explaining his rationale when younger.]

Separating Church and State Does Not Entail Separating Religion and Politics

The dubious reasoning of this “secularist syllogism” rests on a fallacy of equivocation, in which “religion and politics” is wrongly made identical with “church and state.” Church and state are authoritative institutions, while religion and politics are activities pursued by individuals, groups, and organic communities. To disestablish a politically authoritative church is to strike a blow for the freedom of all religious believers to act on their beliefs, politically as well as privately. But insisting on the separation of religious discourse from political discourse, isolating the former from the latter by “privatizing” it, moves in exactly the opposite direction, and creates the contradiction found at the center of many modern tyrannies: affirming a mythical freedom by denying the real thing.