"“Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though indeed one; there is one nature, in manifold persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts."
React to this quote
More by George Holmes Howison
See allResonant Thoughts
"The greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so? — is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplyin…"
"And when he came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said,…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from ou…"
— Frederick William Robertson"In the Kingdom of Mao Bell". 1994, Wired. subtitle: "A billion Chinese are using new technology to create t…"
— Neal Stephenson"No one ever seriously affirmed the literal freedom of will. Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; respo…"
— Henry Adams"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric."
— Thomas Sowell"The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception…"
— Julie Burchill"Liberation from enslavement to interest on money is the clear motto for the global revolution, for the libe…"
— Gottfried Feder