Personal responsibility

“Public bodies feel no personal responsibility, and give full play to intrigue and cabal.”

“What does it mean to live esthetically, and what does it mean to live ethically? The esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.”

“In a spiritual sense that by which a person gives birth is the formative striving of the will and that is within a person’s own power. What are you afraid of then? After all, you are not supposed to give birth to another human being; you are supposed to give birth only to yourself. And yet I am fully aware that there is an earnestness about this that shakes the entire soul; to become conscious in one’s eternal validity is a moment that is more significant than everything else in the world.”

“There is only one thing I do not want to fail to stress, that as soon as the ethical person’s gymnastics become an imaginary construction he has ceased to live ethically. All such imaginary constructing is equivalent to sophistry in the realm of knowledge.”

“Freedom brings men rudely and directly face to face with their own personal responsibility for their own free actions.”

““What a man does by another, he does by himself is a maxim.””

“The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.”

“The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.”

“To liberals and leftists, the message would be equally blunt. In particular, your insistent, almost pathological, fear of understanding the importance of personal responsibility astonishes us. … [W]hat makes us one nation morally is an insistence on a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility.”