David Korten Quotes

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

The more freedom you give people to do good, the more freedom they have to do bad as well.

We must again carry the burden of our people and shoulder our commitment to leading them to the promised land.

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good.

God could have created us to be automatons who were always choosing the right side, making the right decision. It is an incredible thing, God said "I want persons" who therefore have freedom.

But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.

Wouldn't it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for each other rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats.

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

Judgement is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all?

I still love my people, not just my family - my people. I feel a huge responsibility for them.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

The greatest gift God gave us is the power to make decisions.

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

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.

The essence of spiritual life is simply to use our free will properly.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.

The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.