Quotes About Responsibility

Where is fate, and who is fate? We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise. The wind is blowing; those vessels whose sails are unfurled catch it and go forward on their way, but those which have their sails furled do not catch the wind. Is that the fault of the wind.

A man should not be judged by the nature of his duties, but by the manner in which he does them.

Liberty is the first condition of growth. Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others. We talk foolishly against material civilisation. The grapes are sour.

Our life is born on earth, our death is also necessary here, the earth to keep him well, to protect him; We also have the responsibility to rebuild him, only then is it possible to form a new life

God gives every bird his worm, but he does not throw it into the nest.

We forget what missiles our words are, how much damage we can cause with one thoughtless comment between the coffee and the toast.

A biographer is an artist under oath.

Yes, superbosses are willing to advance people, even when protégés don't think they're ready. Yes, they will purposefully step back so their protégés can shine. Yes, they will organize their entire enterprise so that informal, apprenticeship-style learning can take place. But they will ultimately push protégés to step up and take responsibility for their own development by cultivating an everyday focus on learning and growth.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it.

I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.

In a real sense, all of us are "the parents" of all young children - because we help shape the culture and determine its values.

We think the future lies ahead, but its seed is contained in the present. There is no sharp break between the two: the lie we tell today can send us sprawling a year from now; the way we treat our infant determines the way he treats us when he reaches adolescence.

A child owes respect to a parent, but there is no natural obligation to like a parent - unless the parent makes himself likable as a person.

We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.

It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.

Knowing is the key to caring, and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions. They might not care even if they know, but they can't care if they are unaware.

So, should we race to see how quickly we can consume the last tuna, swordfish, and grouper? Or race to see what can be done to protect what remains? For now, there is still a choice.

Our near and distant predecessors might be forgiven for exterminating the last woolly mammoth, the ultimate dodo, the final sea cow, and the last living monk seal for lack of understanding the consequences of their actions. But who will forgive us if we fail to learn from past and present experiences, to forge new values, new relationships, a new level of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive?

But there's another, much darker, way in which Sylvia Earle helps us understand the size of the ocean. And that's to point out that, vast as it is, it's not so big that we can't screw it up.