Quotes About Responsibility

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

This was a people's war. All the people had a stake in it. All the people had an obligation to put their hearts and wealth and blood into it. All would find their futures indelibly shaped by it.

Reflecting from the vantage of more than a century, we can see today how trapped the leaders of the South felt in 1860. That the snare was only partially genuine, and partially in their imaginations and fears, made it no less real to them at the time. They had to act on the basis of what they knew and believed, and the fact that subsequent events and detached dispassionate study reveal that some of their belief was chimerical does not signify.

Some attempts are still making, but they are inconsiderable in comparison of what might be done if the whole body of Christians entered heartily into the spirit of the divine command on this subject. Some think little about it, others are unacquainted with the state of the world, and others love their wealth better than the souls of their fellow-creatures.

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.

He who can deliberately inflict torture upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which God has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart.

I warrant you, if he danced till doomsday, he thought I was to pay the piper.

He that first cries out stop thief, is often he that has stolen the treasure.

The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past.

What do you call dumping 22,000 pounds of organic chemical waste into the Mississippi River every day? You call it "organic loading.

The problem is that those who produce the emissions do not pay for that privilege, and those who are harmed are not compensated.

You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow

Instead, anxious to maintain their revenues at a time of low production and high military expenditure, the Company, in one of the greatest failures of corporate responsibility in history, rigorously enforced tax collection and in some cases even increased revenue assessments by 10 per cent.

One man said it was very wrong to kill the memsahib and the children, and how were they going to get rozgar [employment]? But another said that we were kafirs, and now the King of Delhi would provide for everyone.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together.

Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.

Even animals know better than to foul their own nest

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.

Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution.

Politicians need citizens who will permit them to behave reasonably.