Quotes About Responsibility

Yet despite the plethora of articles, books, films, and warning from scientists and even the military saying that global warming is the single biggest threat to the security of mankind—governments, businesses, and you and I continue to refuse to take meaningful steps to reverse the problem.

Confessions of an Eco-Warrior

He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don't walk in front of cars take care and be good and don't hurt or be hurt and don't live in a way that makes you feel dead and don't betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don't and please remember and make sure

These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they're children again.

Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.

all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages.

It's a question of what love gives you the right to do.

When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.

There's never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever

Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me. Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves, and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.

I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said.

Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes.

The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her.

I wrote an article for The Women's Earth recently. I described a school I worked in where I gave all the children a potted spider plant and told them to look after it for a week like a daddy or mommy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother phoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.

Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don't want your heart! I don't want to be responsible for anybody else's heart. For anybody else's anything!' He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible.

Mum, you just said it yourself: you can't save everybody. She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks. That's true, she said. Very true. But at the same time, can't you always do more?

I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs.

has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.

Peele gets to the core of what contemporary entitlement looks like—concern with one's personal rights combined with non-interest in one's duties