Quotes About Responsibility

It is easy to forget the impact our words have on every relationship. There

If I gossip or engage in ungodly conflict, I harm the gift God has given. But if I am willing to pursue, forgive, and serve, I demonstrate care for these gifts.

In other words, you can't take the gospel seriously and not take your relationships seriously.

We are to be in the world, though not of it. Often Christians have evaded the challenge of this call by defining their role as salt in negative terms. They have simply denounced bad things in the culture and been against things rather than for them.

But he is asking us to own the connection between our thoughts, desires, and words.

Our typical response to conflict is to point the finger at our opponent.

You see, this is what you always do. I come to you and you turn the table on me. You are so good at making other people feel guilty for your failures!

And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone.

Own whatever personal sin you have brought to the situation.

But, more specifically, you make a conscious choice to absorb the cost yourself.

Forgiveness Is Costly, But Not Forgiving Is More Costly

I can only grant forgiveness to the other person if he repents and admits he has sinned against me.

If political leaders choose which rights to give citizens, then there must be a caste of leaders who enjoy greater freedom than do the citizens who are the recipients of these "rights." That is, the rulers must stand on a higher plane from which they can hand down judgments about what rights are to be given to or withheld from the people below.

The better your decisions are, the more choices life gives you.

A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions

Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.

But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders." If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.