What does it mean to live esthetically, and what does it mean to live — Personal responsibility

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

"There is no means by which anyone can evade his responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon “experts” and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His fate and that of his progeny are at stake."

"The ingenuity of man is coterminous with his cupidity. Out of the claptrap of law came the confusion-confounding device of corporate ownership. Thereby a man-made person, utterly soulless and therefore without moral identity, nevertheless serves to absorb the personal responsibility of moral beings. That this contraption prospers under an imperialistic venture must be sheer accident; for, surely, one cannot associate the stock holding widow with the exploitation of some worker in Iran or India. Nor can the directors be individually charged with moral turpitude, since they act only in a collective capacity and everybody knows that a collectivity is without moral responsibility. In Russia the cartel, or trust, has attained beatification by way of “common ownership,” thus absolving all and sundry, especially the commissars, from conscious complicity in the exploitation of Finnish miners or Polish peasants. If “everybody” is an imperialist, nobody is."

"Public bodies feel no personal responsibility and give full play to intrigue and cabal."

"Social power resides in every individual. Just as you put personal responsibility on political behavior, so must you assume personal responsibility for social behavior. It is your job. You think poorly of legislator Brown not because he has violated a tenet of the Tax Reform Society to which you belong, but because hes voting for a tax levy is in your estimation an act of robbery. It is not a peace society which passes judgment on the war maker, it is the individual pacifist. All values are personal. The good society you envision by the decline of the state is a society of which you are an integral part; your campaign is therefore your obligation."

"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."