Quotes About Responsibility

You don't want to give God the credit because you don't think he exists. But if you're going to blame him for all the crap, kid, you got to give him credit for what grows from that fertilized soil.

Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.

He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child's acts are real acts, that even a child's play is not without moral context.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: Tut-tut, what at botch that was? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

You don't know who a person is until you see how he acts when given unexpected power. He hasn't rehearsed for the part. So what you see is what he is.

The loneliness of power.

Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you're taking part in.

Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.

We're an ecological disaster. Exactly, said the expendable.

You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish, and nothing more.

T]hat's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given [to] you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.

We're going to make him the best military commander in history. And then put the fate of the world on his shoulders.

I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.

How did I become the one to make this decision for everyone?

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.

must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

We've just got to face the fact that we're second rate. With the fate of humanity in our hands.

I stole their future from them; I can only begin to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

Together they read the message. COVER YOUR BUTT. BERNARD IS WATCHING. —GOD Bernard went red with anger. "Who did this!" he shouted. "God," said Shen.