This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
Decision | Individual | Responsibility | Sacrifice |
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.
We have surrendered our responsibility to shape the inner life of our children to others.
Children | Life | Life | Responsibility |
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.
God | Hope | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Responsibility | Work | God |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
Need | Responsibility | Think |
Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
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.
Authenticity | Cause | Courage | Experience | Freedom | Responsibility | Unique | Approval |
John Kotter, fully John Paul Kotter
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.
Better | Organization | Responsibility |
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
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.
Better | Change | Commitment | Growth | Life | Life | Responsibility | Afraid |
Douglas Meeks, also M. Douglas Meeks
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.
God | Mystery | Responsibility |
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.
Decision | God | Love | Responsibility | God |
To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you.
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.
Difficulty | Fulfillment | Responsibility | Privilege |
O. Hobart Mowrer, fully Orval Hobart Mowrer
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?
Doctrine | Responsibility | Sin | Society | Society |
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.
Religion | Responsibility | Society |
Behind all faith... lies the plain fact that man, as a creature of free will, cannot shirk the ultimate responsibility for his own fate.
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.
Earth | Intelligence | Nature | Necessity | Need | Refinement | Responsibility | Learn | Privilege |