Quotes About Responsibility

Dolores, please!" Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. "That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He's waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?" I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. "Tell that homo to mind his own business," I said.

What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if? ...

father's command is a son's law!

Making the decision to have a child—it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

He took his hamburger out of the box, bit a large crescent shape out of it, and chewed. I looked away. "I've been thinking," he said. "Our apartment lease is up in less than three months. What do you say we move down to your grandmother's house." "I've been thinking, too," I said. "In a way, you raped her." "What?" "Your high school girlfriend. Sheila. You raped her.

Your children are not your children,'" he said. "'They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile—fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise's. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she'd be alive. Things would be normal. "You're normal!" she'd said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

The President is up there in the White House for you . . . . it is not you who are here for him

Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index. I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is—as distinct from the question of who he is—

Praxis is not a privilege of the Left. It is what the Right does too.

What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn't kill Mr. Nesbitt.

Life is going to be harder for some people. It's going to be harder at different times in our lives. But if you're not ready to die today, then you're going to be responsible for tomorrow, whether you like it or not.

Maybe being loved wasn't enough; maybe there was something else you needed not to get in trouble.

You are not in Disneyland," he said. "The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

I mean, if you think about doing things to people like that, if you think about it too much, it gets all up in you and you can't control it after a while. Then they really got you.

When you're young, you make mistakes. The big thing that's different now is that when I was a kid, you could survive your mistakes. We didn't have guns. Today, kids have access to guns. The same kids that would have been in trouble and gotten a stern talking-to are now going to jail for fifteen or twenty years. Instead of bloody noses there are bodies lying in the street with chalk outlines around them. The values are basically the same, but it's easier to mess up.

W)hen you're playing with fire you've got to deal with the heat...And fire ain't particular about who it burns.

That's what makes poor people poor...They're looking to find treasures instead of working and saving every day.

Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do," Einstein scribbled on the letter, "but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.

Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. "I make 50 cents for showing up," he liked to joke, "and the other 50 cents is based on performance.

What's the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.