Thomas Sowell on collective guilt and individual responsibility

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

~ Thomas Sowell

Walter Williams on poverty, responsibility and welfare

The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence and social sanction, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior. Today’s out-of-wedlock births among blacks is over 70%, but in the 1930s, it was 11%. During the same period, out-of-wedlock births among whites was 3%; today, it is over 30%. It is fashionable and politically correct to blame today’s 21% black poverty on racial discrimination. That is nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Can anyone produce evidence that racists discriminate against black female-headed families but not black husband-and-wife families?

~ Walter Williams, "Today and Yesterday," LewRockwell.com, September 10, 2020

Friedrich Hayek on attitude and success

It is often contended that the belief that a person is solely responsible for his own fate is held only by the successful. This in itself is not so unacceptable as its underlying suggestion, which is that people hold this belief because they have been successful. I, for one, am inclined to think that the connection is the other way round and that people often are successful because they hold this belief. Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug pride of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.

 ~ Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

Carl Jung on action

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

~ Carl Jung, psychotherapist

Scott Peck anticipates the victimology movement

When character-disordered individuals blame someone else - a spouse, a child, a friend, a parent, an employer - or something else - bad influences, the schools, the government, racism, sexism, society, the "system" - for their problems, these problems persist.  Nothing has been accomplished.  By casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow spiritually, and have become dead weight for society.  They have cast their pain on society.

~ M. Scott Peck, M.D., The Road Less Traveled (1978), p. 39

Michael Cloud on personal responsibility vs. paternalist government

People are not trying to escape liberty; they are trying to escape personal responsibility. And it is with that Judas bargain that government persuades us to sell our souls, piecemeal, to the lowest bidder.

~ Michael Cloud

George Bernard Shaw on freedom and responsibility

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Thomas Paine on freedom and responsibility

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

~ Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, no. 1, December 23, 1776

Charley Reese on freedom and responsibility

The kernel of the nut is this: In our constitutional republic, sovereignty rests in the people. If the people are too stupid or ignorant, too lazy or indifferent, to hold their public officials accountable for violating the laws and the Constitution, then of course they will deserve the tyranny they will surely get.

Self-government is tremendously more difficult and demanding than living under a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, all you have to do is obey. I fear that concept appeals to some Americans today. It's understandable. Responsibility can be a heavy load to carry. It's much easier to relegate all of that to the Great Leader and just do what we are told.

Anybody who's ever been in the military or a jail knows what I'm talking about. When you are deprived of the ability to make choices, you are simultaneously relieved of the responsibility for making them. Responsibility is the other side of the coin of freedom.

~ Charley Reese, "Responsibility," October 15, 2007