Quotes About Responsibility

No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

it is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112)

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer, merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.

What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.

If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?

People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

It doesn't do any good to blame people or the time-- one is oneself all those people. We are the time.

Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak.

I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain't going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain't going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don't drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.

No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in society.

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

You stop that,' he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. 'You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It's not my fault I'm white. It's not my fault you're black. It's not my fault he's dead.

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.