Quotes About Responsibility

There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.

Il ne nous suffit pas de comprendre nos obligations à l'égard des autres et de la terre; nous devons aussi les ressentir.

But, my dear boy, you don't eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.

Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it's only then that things can work themselves out.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

Any abundance, in any amount, is illusory if it does not safeguard its producers.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not 'significant' to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to 'need.

The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong.

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith...We do not need to plan or devise a 'word of the future'; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

She thought the human condition was a calculated insult to her personally, the fault of certain people in particular. If she wasn't the president of the United States, or Mrs. Rockefeller, or at least happy, it was somebody else's fault, not hers. Her stinger was always out.

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

Those who will not learn in plenty to keep their place must learn it by their need when they have had their way and the fields spurn their seed. We have failed Thy grace. Lord, I flinch and pray, send Thy necessity. We Who Prayed and Wept, p. 211.

White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

marriage is the earthly form of love that gives love its place and work and provides for the good care of both bodies and souls. ... Marriage takes love out of the mind and places it responsibly in the world. (Poetry and Marriage)

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

What men know and presume about the earth is part of it, passing always back into it, carried on by it into what they do not know. Even their abuses of it, their diminishments and dooms, belong to it.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. . . . One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. ("The Pleasures of Eating," 1989)