Quotes About Responsibility

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

There is no one left," McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America's woes at the turn of the twentieth century, "none but all of us.

By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable.

Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.

Imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of your house, then trying to pick up every feather. It is seemingly impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it. - analogy of the 8th Commandment by Sister Marion

if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes.

The majority of the great fortunes were "won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.

No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Roosevelt," White House aide Robert Sherwood observed, aligning himself with those who believe that a leader is summoned to the fore by the needs of the time.

be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country." The standards

we have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the President and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two.

Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.

A mysterious process unfolds as the president and the flag become rallying points for all Americans. At such moments, if the president is able to meet the challenge, he is able to give shape, to organize, to create and recreate the nation.

He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too "careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.

The people "placed me in an office of the highest dignity and charged me with the duty of maintaining that dignity and proper respect for the office on the part of my subordinates. . . . By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate.

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.

We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy," he proclaimed, "instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours.

Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. "When you're in politics you have to play the game," he told a friend.

no one knew better than Lincoln that words have consequences. In a world of tinder, he was determined to hold his rhetorical gifts in abeyance in order to reach across factions and avoid a single spark that could set loose an avoidable conflagration.

I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds," Roosevelt frequently charged.

him under the heaviest strain to barter his convictions for the sake of holding office.

A writer is the conscience of the world.

These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get "their" representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on—even forcibly and violently—opinions and sets of mind that a short time later—years, a month, even a few minutes—they might utterly repudiate.