QuoteProject
Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Viktor E. Frankl
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

True freedom requires responsibility; without it, freedom can lead to chaos.

Viktor E. Frankl emphasizes that freedom is not just the absence of constraints but must be paired with a sense of responsibility. He argues that unchecked freedom can lead to arbitrary actions, and therefore, he proposes the idea of a Statue of Responsibility to complement the Statue of Liberty, highlighting that true liberty encompasses the acceptance of responsibility towards oneself and others.

Themes

FreedomResponsibilityLibertyPhilosophySociety

In practice

Example use cases

During a discussion on civil rights, one might quote this to emphasize the need for responsible actions.

More from Viktor E. Frankl

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Viktor E. FranklRead
The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God.
Viktor E. FranklRead
Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Viktor E. FranklRead
It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Viktor E. FranklRead
Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
Viktor E. FranklRead
The more one forgives himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
Viktor E. FranklRead

Similar quotes

If cows and horses had hands and could draw, cows would draw gods that look like cows and horses would draw gods that look like horses.
XenophanesRead
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.
Robert MusilRead
Sentences are not as such either true or false.
J. L. AustinRead
Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that...his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?
Alvin PlantingaRead
My long struggles as a soldier of the Chinese Revolution have forced me to realize the necessity of facing hard facts. There will be neither peace, nor hope, nor future for any of us unless we honestly aim at political, social and economic justice for all peoples of the world, great and small.
Chiang Kai-ShekRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.