Quotes About Responsibility

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.

But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you've done nothing good for yourself. That's the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.

Our citizens and those who have gone before us charted the broad outlines of where we need to go, and they would envy our opportunity to translate those dreams into action. And I believe they will judge us very harshly should we fail to act.

We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?

We are all complicit, and farmer-bashing is not going to help. We need farmers, more than any other profession. If lawyers, politicians, bankers, university academics or salesmen were to somehow disappear tomorrow, I think the world would muddle through pretty well. Some things might even get better. But if farmers were to vanish, most of us would be dead within a year.

Increasing the distance between the [combatants]—whether by emphasizing their differences or by increasing the chain of responsibility between the aggressor and his victim allows for an increase in the degree of aggression. —Ben Shalit The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

Carl von Clausewitz warned that "it is to no purpose, it is even against one's better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.

if we drill our children on mass murder simulators, that too will be a reflexive, autopilot skill that is available to them at some tragic moment of truth.

If a pro ball player stays up the night before a game, playing video games or watching TV, the other players would kick his tail, the coach would fine him, and that nonsense would stop immediately.

Exxon Valdese, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island had one thing in common: They were all industrial accidents that occurred in the middle of the night involving people with sleep management problems. Insufficient sleep is responsible for billions of dollars of industrial accidents.

The guy pulling the trigger," wrote Allen Cole and Chris Bunch, "never suffers as much as the person on the receiving end." It is the existence of the victim's pain and loss, echoing forever in the soul of the killer, that is at the heart of his pain.

A trainer should never declare his students to be dead

Can we teach our officers to shoot too well? I don't think so. If we trained our officers in first aid, and everyone they treated survived, did we train them too well? If we trained our officers in driving, and they never had anymore accidents, did we train them too well? If someone must die in an armed encounter, let it be the subject who is initiating the hostile action, and not another officer.

El soldado entiende que hay veces cuando todos los otros han fallado y entonces tiene que «pagar la cuenta del carnicero» y luchar, sufrir, y morir para arreglar los errores de los políticos y cumplir la «voluntad del pueblo».

A tremendous volume of research indicates that the primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane man wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying) is not the force of self-preservation but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield.

There's a freedom to being young that is harder to come by as time goes on.

Management does not just involve praise--anyone can do that, although many do not. Management also involves looking someone in the eyes and delivering the hard message that the employee has reached too high.

Dear Admiral Rickover, If you want to stop killing people, read this. Very respectfully, Dave Oliver Captain, US Navy

You have to understand that in a person's life there are a few precious moments in which decisions, choices that you make now, will affect you for the rest of your life.

Having children doesn't make you a good parent, it means you had sex. That's all.

Requiring nothing of a child gives them no opportunity for failure or success.

If you as a leader allow people to halfway do their jobs and don't demand excellence as a prerequisite to keeping their job, you will create a culture of mediocrity.

Debt is not a tool; it is a method to make banks wealthy, not you. The borrower truly is slave to the lender.