“From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility.”

“Well I know Gyuri [the familiar diminutive of Georg or György], that human beings are unapproachable, that their souls are as far from each other as stars; only the remote radiance reaches to the other. I know that human beings are surrounded by dark, great seas, and thus they look across to one another, yearning but never reaching one another”

“Kafka was a realist”

“A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.”

“Only Individuals have a sense of Responsibility”

“Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story(from the Bible)turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was,but now I know it is.”

“About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less.”