Quotes About Responsibility

If you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing

quoted Djuna Barnes: "Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

But I knew , she said, I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. 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. Or hadn't you heard?

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

From my chair, I looked out my window, over these dreadful streets. The baby asked, 'Is there not one righteous among them?

Negroes know how little most white people are prepared to implement their words with deeds, how little, when the chips are down, they are prepared to risk. And this long history of moral evasion has had an unhealthy effect on the total life of the country, and has eroded whatever respect Negroes may once have felt for white people.

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else.

I don't think the negro problem can be 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. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as if it were a thing apart

Every effort made by the child's elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be "good" not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.

So, let me tell you what you got to do. You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don't care what else happens or don't happen. You got to do that. Can't nobody else do that for you. And the rest of us, well, we going to hold on to you.

civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.

anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The

I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about.

To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.

I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people van be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.