Quotes About Responsibility

You can do almost anything, but you can undo absolutely nothing.

God doesn't do anything to us. He doesn't have to. We're too busy doing it to each other.

Humans have "dominion" over animals. But that "dominion" (radah in Hebrew) does not mean despotism, rather we are set over creation to care for what God has made and to treasure God's own treasures.

It is because God loves and cares for creation and because, moreover, that great creative generosity is shown us in Jesus Christ, that we have a sure moral imperative for our dealings with fellow creatures.

There are only two ways to deal with the media: either elect to take the Buddha's vow of eternal silence, or make one's voice known as responsibly as one humanly can, and take the consequences.

Er) hat in unbegreiflicher Verblendung übersehen, daß ein Mensch auch ohne selbstständige Ideen und ohne Persönlichkeit in dem Augenblick Wesen und Inhalt annimt, in dem man Macht auf ihn überträgt.

I did not see that there was much more I could do for Jeff. He was now totally in the hands of other people. They would decide what he wore, what he ate, where he slept, what medication, if, any, he received. My fatherly duties had been reduced to the provision of a few small services, none of them basic. As a father, my role had almost disappeared.

Everything people do that doesn't work has to be somebody else's fault. Next time you know, geezers'll be suing the government for getting old and kids'll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

Children live in the same world we do.To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive, it's a vanity.We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we're doing our best.

Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.

The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn't think that something you couldn't do and were not doing would take any energy, but it did.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it's the fault of somebody who's dead.

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

I didn't put in my diaphragm' I mumbled when we were through. You stirred, 'Is it dangerous?' 'It's very dangerous,' I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.

I mean when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I'm a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can't believe this.

We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this "doing your bit" is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.

So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am.

We agreed that whether we became parents would be 'the single most important decision we would ever make together.' Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbelina that wets iself for Christmas.

Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to go by, ... She'd force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she didn't understand that it was there for her and not the other way round.

You can only subject people who have a conscience to anguish . You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good