Quotes About Responsibility

If your negligent neighbor falls asleep with a lit cigarette in his mouth, setting his house on fire, he's irresponsible and guilty. But you don't want him to perish in the blaze. Nor do you want his house setting the whole neighborhood on fire. So you call in the fire department, even though it will cost taxpayers money.

Baseball, however, is the most individual of team sports: In perfectly discernible packets the game reduces to one batter versus one pitcher, with each assuming responsibility for the other, every matchup a still photograph that flipped together form the moving picture we call nine innings.

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters

Love is a better master than duty.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

Older men start wars, but younger men fight them.

Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.

It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.

Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair.

Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.

The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

The state was made for man, not man for state.