Quotes About Responsibility

the environmental consequences of our actions today are so large, powerful, and long-lived that they cannot be fully understood from a mere century-scale point of view.

the key insight for now is that we will miss Jesus' solution if we follow some narrative that pushes everything out toward external blame. Such a narrative is like a faulty sign pointing us away from Jesus because his acceptance of us takes place inside us—it doesn't happen "out there.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

Now that I'm a dad, I'm practicing what I call 'one- handed cooking ' because I've got something more important in my other arm. I'm whipping up lots of frittatas and omelets.

If psychically sensitive, we'll be aware of every mood, activity, or need of the living and the dead, yet have no one taking care of us. Healers are often the worst off, because the world is full of people happy to deposit their problems in someone else's energy field and steal love in return. And those of us sensitive to the environment will feel for every living being everywhere, but lack the power to help the great or the small.

We are predators and destroyers but also builders and repairers.

Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.

True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it.

You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.

Being somebody's looking glass is not your job.

True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it. But no. Suddenly at every public function his previously godless neighbors would stand with hands on heart to earnestly intone the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "God Bless America.

The little ADA had better do her job and keep him there.

John had just released "Imagine," the song that would become an international anthem for peace, telling the world to "live as one," yet he couldn't pick up the phone, make peace with me and arrange to see his own son. Surely, I reasoned, Julian meant more to him than some foolish agreement with Yoko about dealing with each other's ex-partner. I was wrong. It was three years before John saw Julian again.

One problem with agreeing to keep a secret is that it always starts off feeling like an easy, little decision. But it doesn't stay easy or little. it sits there like one of those jagged ledges hiding under the surface of the ocean at high tide—quietly waiting to rip everything apart if you forget, for even a second, it's there.

As we continued upward, I thought about how adults sometimes complain that kids only think about ourselves, but it's not true. We care a lot about other people, but most times, we don't have the power to change things for them.

But I know now that you can't expect anything from anybody. If somebody loves you, it's because he wants to. And it's never because it's what he's supposed to do." —Pete Cassidy

High-performing people are good at staying almost exclusively focused on what they are responsible for and what they can do right here, right now.

I got to thinking—when it was too late—you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can.

People had no more choice than animals about the burdens they carried.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized.

Glad to see you, Pettigrew. Are you defending the bigamy to-morrow?" "Alas! I am neither prosecuting nor defending. In fact, I am here on false pretences. For the time being, I am the lowest thing in the scale of human creation." The Clerk's bushy eyebrows met in a frown. "You're not going to tell me you've been summoned on a jury?" he said incredulously.

Daily he was called upon to solve the insoluble, to divine the truth between competing perjuries, to apportion derisory incomes among innumerable creditors,

The big thieves hang the little ones.

Indeed, the price one had to pay to remain true to the logic of History was terrible. One had to behold passively the death of thousands, take on one's conscience the torture of women and children transformed into human torches