Quotes About Responsibility

It was unclean to clean; it was unclean even to notice. It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.

A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the djinn, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?

ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as foes—we do not know. Nor again do we know why they vanished, although given our species' dismal record as responsible stewards of nature, it's a decent bet that we drove them to extinction.

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind'.

I told her you were probably here'. 'Thanks,' Tony said. 'Did I mention she thinks her brother's murder is my fault?

One of the hardest things we have to do is learn to take responsibility for our own actions. Trying to sidestep actions that deep down we know are shameful is a powerful instinct. From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

Carol Jordan had been the perfect boss as far as she was concerned.

It didn't matter that he knew there was a serial killer loose in Bradfield. He couldn't afford to be the one to say it first.

So you're a functioning drunk. You don't have to be falling down in the street or pissing yourself or sleeping with unsuitable men or losing whole days at a time to be a drunk.

That was one of the reasons she'd liked working for Carol Jordan. The boss cared about her results, not the minutiae of how she got them, provided that nothing Stacey did was going to come back and bite them in the arse at a later stage.

Doctors tended to blame mothers for encouraging their daughters to tight-lace in order to win a rich husband, while mothers often argued that their daughters persisted in the practice despite pleas to stop. Both doctors and members of the general public tended to believe that women's bodies were, by nature, weaker than men's.

A wife, he knew, was a huge armful of responsibility, and responsibility was the disease in man. But he was lonely, and twice as lonely after leaving the woman by the graves.

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say No. There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.

Jenny lacked any sense of property - she was constantly apologising to Yevgenia and asking for her permission to open the small upper window in order to let in her elderly tabby cat. Her main interests and worries centered around this cat and how to protect it from her neighbors... She fed her own rations to the cat, whom she called 'my dear, silver child' The cat adored her; he was a rough sullen beast, but would become suddenly animated and affectionate when he saw her.

The labour of those who enjoy the confidence of the Party is imperceptible. But it is a vast labour – one must expend one's mind and soul generously, keeping nothing back.

As she passed her son-in-law's room, she would repeat a joke she had heard from the workers at the factory: 'We, the owners, must be at work by six, our employees by nine.

Chi scrive ha il dovere di raccontare una verità tremenda, e chi legge ha il dovere civile di conoscerla, questa verità. Chiunque giri le spalle, chiuda gli occhi o passi oltre offende la memoria dei caduti.

Oggi come oggi ogni singolo uomo è tenuto, dinanzi alla sua coscienza, a suo figlio e a sua madre, dinanzi alla patria e al genere umano a rispondere con tutta la forza del cuore e della mente a una domanda: che cosa ha generato il razzismo? Che cosa bisogna fare affinché il nazismo, il fascismo, l'hitlerismo non abbiano a risorgere né al di qua né al di là dell'oceano, mai e poi mai, in secula seculorum?

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their deaths without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

Zoebarev, tweede luitenant – bevelhebber over de infanteristen