From “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust” by Viktor E. Frankl
Individual responsibility stands at the centre of Frankl’s understanding of how we should conduct ourselves. On one occasion he recommended that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented on the West Coast of the United States by a Statue of Responsibility. ‘Everything,’ he once wrote, ‘can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’ And to do so, there was the opportunity of self-criticism, or self-analysis; as Frankl expressed it, in his inimitable way: ‘Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as though you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!’
‘The last of the human freedoms’, Frankl believes, is the ability ‘to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way’. When we are no longer able to change a situation ‘we are challenged to change ourselves’.