Albert Schweitzer Quotes

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

In terms of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.

Nature, machine-like, works definitely and heartlessly, if in the main beautifully. Hence, if we, as individuals, do not make this dream of a god or what he stands for us real in our thoughts and deeds, then he is not real or true.

Every person must stand up and be accountable, but be responsible for their actions.

Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.

For whatever reason, I have never separated the technical from the ethical.

Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

To be individually righteous is the first of all duties, come what may to ones self, to one's country, to society, and to civilization itself.

If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.

You can't dump one cup of sugar into the ocean and expect to get syrup. If everybody sweetened her own cup of water, then things would begin to change.

It is pretty hard to talk about responsibility unless you have exercised it yourself.

If we try to define our own moral universe, there's a price for that.

A person of responsibility can trust himself to choose the right thing over the easy thing.

Because we had to convince the scientific members of Transylvania that with the procedure I was using on the creature, Dr. Frankenstein could be taught to be a civilized human being, what I called a man about town. Instead of a monster who's going to kill their children, it was someone who could sing and dance.

Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers. I made the decision, therefore I am responsible.

It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it.

Ethical existence [is] the highest manifestation of spirituality.

Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us! All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!