Quotes About Responsibility

The movements of a great nation are connected in all their parts. If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.

I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities?

It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.

Rules are not valid because the senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do.

But responsibility for the garden does not mean that we can make a garden of nature, as though it were a poiema of which we could take possession. A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences. The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script-without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

Many people feel like they were born into the wrong family. Nevertheless, adults must take responsiblity for the pain of the past and create a productive life in the present.

Kids grow up in troubled homes thinking that they have the power to change their parents. Over time, they realize that they are mistaken.

I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them." JOHN WAYNE in his last film, The Shootist (1976)

Do we fulfill our obligations by being practical all the time?

I simply cannot understand unpunctuality. Why should anybody be late? I know exactly how long it takes me to dress.

Through it all, Eric didn't say a word. He was innocent, Eric reminded himself, he never participated in the pranks. He never lifted a finger to harm David Hallenback. He didn't think it was funny, so he usually walked away, pretending not to see. But Eric did see. Just like all the other kids in the halls. And he slowly began to recognize it for what it was.

At the very least, people who get subsidies should have to get up in the morning and do something, even if it's a make work job. But most liberals would oppose even this simple test of responsibility.

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

That's what I think more and more. There's nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There's just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.

Will our grandchildren enjoy the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, or will they ask us, "Where were you when freedom died?" The choices we make in the next few years—in our personal lives, families, churches, and politics—will determine the answer.

Wringing your hands only stops you from rolling up your sleeves.

She handed him her gun. "Down," she ordered. "Shoot anybody that comes into view." "What about you?" "No, don't shoot me." "I mean where are you going?

The past is the past. It's now up to us to sustain our own culture. We only lose what we fail to nurture.