This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Theologians have always recognized that passions may overwhelm the person suddenly and completely to the pint where freedom of choice does not exist and responsibility is not present." - J. Dominian
"In your daily life, you can treat people you meet in a way that strengthens them in spirit through genuine interest or respect… not a patronizing or false sense of sincerity… but rather a genuine curiosity and respect for each individual you meet… Your actions do make a lasting impact on each person you encounter. It’s an enormous responsibility to take seriously how you treat the people in your life, and a great joy to know you have acted with caring, warmth, and love." - Leonard Felder
"I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures" - Elio Frattaroli
"If, as Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate” – that is, if our fate is largely determined by the habitual tendencies of our repetition compulsion-personality – then the power of consciousness is that it allows us to change impulses, we have what Kierkegaard called “the possibility of possibility”: the possibility of having a free choice and the moral responsibility that comes with it. In that sense, the fear of consciousness is ultimately the fear of moral responsibility, because if we own our anxiety, shame, and guilt, and allow ourselves to have full consciousness of emotions that motivate our behavior, then we will inevitably recognize the full weight of our responsibility for that behavior." - Elio Frattaroli
"Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness were it not for respect… respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Whatever complaints the neurotic patient may have, whatever symptoms he may present are rooted in his inability to love, if we mean by love a capacity for the experience of concern, responsibility, respect, and understanding of another person and the intense desire for that other person’s growth." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Naturalistic determinism has not yet found a place for the concept of individual responsibility." - Ralph Henry Gabriel
"Responsibility . . . requires that a person think, speak and act as if personally accountable to all who may be affected by his or her thoughts, words and deeds… Awareness is important… Am I moving in the right direction? Is my sense of responsibility growing, deepening, becoming sharper and more insistent?.. A sense of responsibility is an attitude, a feeling." - Robert K. Greenleaf
"There’s a moment when the choice to act moves beyond a discussion of motives, for even an awareness of our own motives can become a form of necessity that lets our responsibility off the hook. And the moment of faith is a moment when no part of us is excused. With no ifs, no buts, no conditions, no escape clauses, all we are is challenged to rise to the choice and shoulder the responsibility for our answer." - Os Guiness
"Business has become, in this last half century, the most powerful institution on the planet. The dominant institution in any society needs to take responsibility for the whole." - Willis Harman
"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect in human weakness and in human responsibility. Without a global resolution in human consciousness nothing will change for the better and catastrophe will be unavoidable." - Václav Havel
"The secret of man is the secret of his responsibility." - Václav Havel
"We are living at a time when humankind can face whatever threatens it only if we, by which I mean each of us, manage to revive, with new energy and new ethos, a sense of responsibility for the rest of the world." - Václav Havel
"Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to beat the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness or badness… Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"Man’s responsibility to God is the scaffold on which he stands as daily he goes on building life. His every deed, every incident of mind, takes place on this scaffold, so that unremittingly man is at work either building up or tearing down his life, his home, his hope of God." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Responsibility implies freedom, and man, who is in bondage to environment, to social ties, to inner disposition, may yet enjoy freedom before God." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Social dynamics is no substitute for moral responsibility." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The issue we should all ponder is moral, not legal; responsibility, rather than guilt; prevention rather than punishment." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"We have surrendered our responsibility to shape the inner life of our children to others." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader." - Herman Hesse
"It takes courage to experience the freedom that comes with autonomy, courage to accept intimacy and directly encounter other persons, courage to take a stand in an unpopular cause, courage to choose authenticity over approval and to choose it again and again, courage to accept the responsibility for your own choices, and, indeed, courage to be the unique person you really are." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
"It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else… Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"Power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages." - Rudyard Kipling
"Corporations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. In many businesses, decentralization is the key. By definition, it pushes responsibility lower in an organization and in the process creates more challenging jobs at lower levels." - John Kotter, fully John Paul Kotter
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." - Abraham Lincoln
"Only by being permitted to experience the consequences of his actions will the child acquire a sense of responsibility; and within the limits marked by the demands of his safety this must be done. From such training we can expect many benefits to the person, one of which will certainly be the development of a natural rather than an imposed control over [himself]." - Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder
"To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you." - Stella Terrill Mann
"The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects… The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind." - Everett Dean Martin
"The quality of a person’s life is directly proportional to the degree of responsibility he takes for his own life and the commitment he makes to change for the better. Don’t be afraid of pains and sufferings. They are divine gifts for our growth." - Bibhuti Mazumder
"The mystery of idolatry is that persons reflect what they possess. Idolatry is being possessed by a possession and thereby refusing God’s claim on oneself and shirking one’s responsibility toward others in the community." - Douglas Meeks, also M. Douglas Meeks
"This is the essence of humanism: we have the privilege and responsibility to consider deep questions and to courageously bear the answers and the difficulty in finding solid answers. In doing so, one can aspire to one’s chosen values, and hopefully find fulfillment in the process." - Jason A. Merchey
"To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor." - Thomas Merton
"Behind all faith... lies the plain fact that man, as a creature of free will, cannot shirk the ultimate responsibility for his own fate." - Paul Elmer More
"Is there no such thing as moral responsibility and social accountability at all? Is every mean or vicious thing that you or I as ordinary individuals do, not sin, but rather as expression of “illness”? Who would seriously hold that a society could long endure which consistently subscribed to this flaccid doctrine?" - O. Hobart Mowrer, fully Orval Hobart Mowrer
"Organized religion is too respectable, too much at home in America, and so too much inclined to abdicate its responsibility as a judge of society." - Herbert J. Muller
"We have not so much the privilege of intelligence, viewed as something above and against nonhuman nature, but the responsibility and necessity to convert our intelligence to the earth. We need to learn how to use intelligence to mend the distortions we have created and how to convert intelligence into an instrument that can cultivate the harmonies and balances of the ecological community and bring these to a refinement." - Rosemary Radford Ruether
"Prayer is the responsibility to meet others with all I have, to be ready to encounter the unconditional in the conditional, to expect to meet God in the way, not to turn aside from the way." - John Robinson, fully John Arthur Thomas Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich
"There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
"In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"The major power facing bureaucracy is not the struggle for power but the evasion of responsibility; bureaucrats are very reluctant to take action." - Dean Rusk, fully David Dean Rusk
"The ability to accept responsibility is the measure of the person." - Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist
"The need for imagination, a sense of truth and a feeling of responsibility: those are the three forces which are the very nerve of education." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner