Quotes About Responsibility

We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family, we feel we're not working hard enough.

As you know, Francis, I hate like the dickens to have to send any boy to the reformatory. I refuse to believe that any child is intentionally bad. The entire theory behind my work is to prove to certain people that incorrigible children are only incorrigible because we make them that way—that their failure is not theirs alone, but ours as well." She smiled at me. "Do you understand what I'm saying?

But the company is going to be generous. In spite of the fact that the accident was the fault of the men, we're goin' to give each of the miners' families a hundred dollars death compensation and six months' free rent at the company's houses." Andy didn't speak.

Kids are a pain in the ass.

Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.

This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything that happens in the world is our doin

I'm a traditional Jew, and I observe the biblical dietary laws. … I suspect most of you assume I go around all day saying to myself, 'Boy, would I love to eat pork chops, but that mean old God won't let me.' Not so. The fact … is, I go around all day saying, 'Isn't it incredible? There are five billion people on this planet and God cares what I have for lunch [and] what kind of language I use.

I will criticize individuals when they deserve criticism, but I will not condemn entire populations. We have seen where that leads.

You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

Why did they say that? Why did they assume that they were somehow responsible for this tragedy? Who taught them to believe in a God who would strike down an attractive, gifted young woman without warning as punishment for someone else's ritual infraction?

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.

Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it?

Oh my Eva, whose little hour on earth did so much good... what account have I to give for my long years?

Thee mustn't speak evil of thy rulers, Simeon," said his father, gravely. "The Lord only gives us our worldly goods that we may do justice and mercy; if our rulers require a price of us for it, we must deliver it up.

To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another.

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Now," said the young man, stooping gravely over his book of bills, "if you can assure me that I really can buy this kind of pious, and that it will be set down to my account in the book up above, as something belonging to me, I wouldn't care if I did go a little extra for it. How d'ye say?" "Wal, raily, I can't do that," said the trader. "I'm a thinkin that every man'll have to hang on his own hook, in them ar quarters.

Well," said Eliza, mournfully, "I always thought that I must obey my master and mistress, or I couldn't be a Christian.

Now, John, I don't know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow." "But in cases where your doing so would involve a great public evil--" "Obeying God never brings on public evils. I know it can't. It's always safest, all round, to do as He bids us.

Greasy or not greasy, they will govern you, when their time comes," said Augustine; "and they will be just such rulers as you make them.

Ah, good brother! is it fair for you to expect of us services which your own brave, honorable heart would not allow you to render, were you in our place?