Quotes About Responsibility

An essential mechanism of censorship, in Orwell's view, is a good education. If you've gone to the best schools, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say, or, we may add, even to think. It all becomes part of your being. And if you're a good student and have properly absorbed the lessons, you can become a responsible intellectual. That's the unpublished preface to Animal Farm.

quién gobierna el mundo?, puede que queramos replantearla de esta forma: ¿qué principios y valores gobiernan el mundo? Esa pregunta debería ser la más importante en la mente de los ciudadanos de los países ricos y poderosos, que disfrutan de un inusual legado de libertad, privilegios y oportunidades gracias a las luchas de aquellos que lucharon por ello antes y que ahora se enfrentan a funestas opciones para responder a retos de gran importancia humana.

As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts

But from the point of view of the masters of mankind, it doesn't matter much—"as long as we make plenty of profit tomorrow, who cares if our grandchildren won't have a world to live in?

Since democratic leaders can't wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding and have to engineer consent to socially constructive goals and values, some obvious questions arise. Who makes the decisions about these goals and values? What factors enter into the decisions of "democratic leaders"? How is their "responsibility" and dedication to the public interest established?

They all know exactly what they're doing, not just the reporters and the editors of the major press, but also the CEOs of the energy and financial corporations. And, of course, also the political leaders. They're not illiterate.

What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.

The business of voting your conscience is: Do you really care just about how you feel? or, Do you care about what happens to the world? If you care about what you feel you don't have any conscience, you're not a moral agent at all, so stop talking about conscience, you don't have any.

In a democratic society, we, the intelligent minority, have the duty of directing the "ignorant and stupid" masses to what we decide are proper goals, using whatever deception is required. All for their own good.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the "responsibility of peoples," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

You know, everything adds up. It's what I keep saying in my books and in Cosmo. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So do it and be it and write the letters and make the phone calls and get on with it.

And the newfangled rigmarole of joint custody doesn't do anything to ease the cold reality: in order to see one parent, the divorced child must walk out on the other.

For months I'd been doing nothing but boiling eggs and teaching my child to differentiate between the cat in the hat and the fox in socks and Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state was actually angry at me! It's stuff like this that got us into Cambodia.

Up to this point your life has pretty much sucked. You're not responsible for that. But you are responsible for what happens from here on.

You're the woman in my life," he said. "Another thing about me and my brothers? We look after the women in our lives. We don't know any other way.

After weighing the pros and cons, I've decided sex with you would be mutually satisfying. You're attractive and pleasant. And clean. You kiss very well, and while I've found that's not always a reliable gauge for skill in bed, it often follows. If you're agreeable, we can finish dinner, I'll show you the greenhouse, then we can go in and have sex. I'm on birth control, but I would require you wear a condom.

She left me because she could, because I made a choice that allowed her to walk away. I could make her proud of me, proud of what she'd accomplished in me, but I could never make her love me.

You're excuses are so lame they're limping...

The man who loses the boy is a sad and serious man.