“As part of "moral philosophy," the concept of "natural liberty" clicks easily into place. Man, as an ethical integer, is either free to choose between good and bad courses within thelimits of his circumstances, or he is not. If he is not free, if he canonly accept what is handed to him from above (by fate, or by decree of the human agents of fate), then there is not much use in talking about morality or ethics. To make any sense of the ideaof morality, it must be presumed that the human being is responsible for his actions-and responsibility cannot be understood apart from the presumption of freedom of choice.”

“Man is certainly free, but he is responsible for this freedom before God as before men. This responsibility is inevitably moral. In order of this morality, to be free is to protect the freedom of others and their dignities.”

“Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

“For the moral basis, it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences”

“The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.”

“In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is – i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.”