Quotes About Responsibility

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.

Any community's arm of force--military, police, security--needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in.

Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged on one thing: the result.

For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

In this world, a man must be either anvil or hammer.

Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

It's amazing to me that young people will still pick up a cigarette.

I can't help but be a different person now that I've had kids. That really does change your whole perspective on life for the better. I definitely feel like I've grown up. So, I guess in a way parts of me are going to be different, but in general I'm still the same girl from the Bronx who had big dreams.

I wake up in bed alone. The silence in my room reminds me of the emptiness in my heart. I failed at love--again. Except this time, it wasn't just me. I am haunted by the inescapable thought that I let down my beautiful babies, Max and Emme. I wanted so badly for things to have turned out differently.

Obviously no parent does everything right. It's this weird thing that happens where you are striving to be as good as you can be so that they turn out well. And that requires that you be a really great, evolved, aware person in every moment. Which is pretty awesome. But it's also putting tremendous pressure on yourself--which is why women feel so guilty!

Ever since I got married I've been thinking night and day about whose fault it was, and every time I think about it, out comes a new fault to eat up the old one; but always there's a fault left.

Adam & Eve. The serpent cracked the mirror in a thousand pieces, & the apple was his rock.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It won't do to shrink from hard speeches and judgments when they are necessary. But it is horrible to make them when one is not compelled.

Nearly everybody yields up his conscience, his practical judgment, into the keeping of others.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.