Quotes About Responsibility

For as fashionable as cynicism always was, the truth was that when it came to basic human responsibility, people rose to the challenge. Pretty much always. As many times as Hell had been created, history stood as indisputable proof that the mass of humanity was good. People built more than they burned, created more than they destroyed, not by a little but by a massive surplus. To know

Now sit down and shut up, you autocratic frat boy. It's adult swim.

Protecting America is not a job for the squeamish.

First they came for the revolutionaries, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a revolutionary. Then they came for the intellectuals, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an intellectual. Then they came for the tier ones, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a tier one. Then they came for the brilliants, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a brilliant. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

I'm OK with firing people when they fuck up, but canning them when they've done nothing wrong - that's painful. [on the layoffs needed after 9/11 hit the business]

I'm just a girl in a nurse's uniform, but that doesn't mean I know how to save these men, and they- they are men in uniforms, but that doesn't mean they know how to die.

One final time I told myself I wasn't abducting my little brother.

If what we make comes back to haunt us , to define us and alter us, well, then, hadn't we better be very careful what we create?

Who holds the ultimate responsibility for the story? The writer or the reader, the reader or the writer . . .

But some of our choices are bigger, not massive, but bigger, and they have an impact on the people around us: shall I help that old lady with her shopping, or not? Shall I say something kind to you when I meet you? Shall I laugh at your ideas, shall I walk through the world gently, or shall I push everyone aside?

It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.

It might be pardonable to refuse to defend some men, but to defend them negligently is nothing short of criminal.

Let the punishment match the offense.

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

It is up to each of us to take responsibility for controlling the way we percieve and react to the world, and learn to adjust to changing circumstances.

Before Huey was 5, I could take him to work with me. Now, though, he has sports and lessons and friends, and it's not fair to remove him from his whole life.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups.

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along.

One wouldn't want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment

God and Nature together shaped him to lead in the van, In the stress of her wildest weather when the Nation needed a Man.

I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.

But all through the evening every time I looked at him I'd find his blue eyes fixed on me, with that naked look one can't help recognizing, and can't help remembering either that one has a certain power and occasionally men are vulnerable to it, and sometimes one ends up hurting them. But when it's happening it all seems worth it, and in the end too: however it ends I think, as far as I can tell so far, it still stays worth it.

The spiritual director has the double task of holding up the demands of absolute responsibility and the promise of absolute forgiveness.