Quotes About Responsibility

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point

Words are our servants, not our masters.

To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.

Do we really need policing — whether by God or by each other — in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner?

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Shouldn't you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and nay be nay?

Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?

For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty.

If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder.

Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?

Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than 'environmental' ones?

Sugerir que la primera causa, la gran desconocida que es responsable de que exista algo en vez de nada, es un ser capaz de diseñar el universo y de hablar a millones de personas simultáneamente, es una abdicación total de la responsabilidad de encontrar una explicación. Es una espantosa exhibición de confianza en un gancho celestial, llena de autoindulgencia y negación del pensamiento.

Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism.

Atheists don't have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you've heard the cynical witticism 'Conscience is knowing that someone is watching'.

Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now.

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.

She sometimes wondered, Francie continued, if parents' mistake was to make too much of their importance to their children, and their children repeat the same mistake.

My dad used to say, you young never carry your weight.

It did not mean those things he had been told it meant, that the soldier could now rest, that his job was done. What job? Why? How could anyone rest?

What sort of soldier are you? she asked. Not much of one. Using his book, he tapped the triangular brown patch with its inset green circle sewn on his tunic shoulder. 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station. I'm a doctor. He

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.