Quotes About Responsibility

I knew that over and above the truth, there exists another duty which is much more important and much more human.

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

An old fisherman heard all this and shook his head. "This is what happens to those who don't get married," he said. "All they want to do is save the world, by hook or by crook. The sperm rises to their heads and attacks their brains. For God's sake, all of you: get married, let your forces loose on women and have children in order to calm yourselves!

Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe.

It's all because of doing things by halves and saying things by halves, being good by halves, that the world is in the mess it's in today.

A fault confessed is half redressed.

Good Lord, just think what poor old God must go through also," he said with a laugh. "He certainly got himself in hot water when he created the world. The fish screams, Don't blind me, Lord; don't let me enter the nets! The fisherman screams, Blind the fish, Lord; make him enter the nets! Which one is God supposed to listen to? Sometimes he listens to the fish, sometimes to the fisherman—and that's the way the world goes round!

Love responsibility. Say: It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.

you, pious milktoast: you don't murder, steal or commit adultery—because you are afraid. All your virtues are daughters of fear.

Food didn't kill people, for God's sake, people killed people. With their harping, and criticizing, and careful living.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.

It is an artist's duty to reflect the times.

First time, shame on you," she began, her husky tone serious. "Second time, shame on me.

He felt the same way about pulling teeth as he did about amputating limbs, hating to take away something he was never going to be able to put back.

To hold a human soul in the palm of your hand like a pebble. To feel somebody slip away, yet by your actions to bring her back! Not even a king had such power. Selected.

We feel free to criticize otherwise-honest police officers who protect crooked cops because of their Blue Code. But we have our White Code. It allows some doctors to get away with clinical shoddiness and bad medicine, and I say to hell with it.

Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world.

If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil

The idea that we must choose between the method of winning hearts and minds and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.