Quotes About Responsibility

Wendell Berry: There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty; the spirit of creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.

The thing you've got to understand about Eva and me is that we have a system. She does the wanting, I do the paying. That's how it's always been with us, and if I'm to be honest, until now it's suited me as well as it has her. Maybe better, since it's spared me the burden of having to want things for myself.

Lo que más me aterra en este mundo —le dice Neil a Wayne— es la posibilidad de que le destroces la vida a alguien sin tú saberlo. O incluso de que le cambies la vida. Detesto pensar que uno puede tener ese poder, yo sería una madre deplorable.

Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_

i will admit there's a certain degree of giving a fuck that goes into not giving a fuck. by saying you don't care if the world falls apart, in some small way you're saying you want it to stay together, on your terms.

I want love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on it's own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? —DR. SHERWOOD ROWLAND

David Foster Wallace: Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the

David Foster Wallace: Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the planet.

Now I no longer believed that one man or even one group of men were responsible. There were too many connections, too many avenues of villainy. Too many men had too much power and knowledge, but none could be made to answer for their crimes because they hid themselves in endless mazes of deceit and fiction.

It is one thing to accept that one is powerless to stop the suffering in the world, but quite another to benefit from what brings misery to others.

Choices are in our power, but consequences are not.

Every time I have to make a choice," he said, "I feel the weight of making the right one—not just for the moment, not just for me, but for how my decisions will affect everyone. I'm terrified I'll do something, or not do something, and the consequences will be terrible.

There will always be a storm. You may be rained on or cause the rain yourself. I much prefer the latter.

If we do nothing...and turn our backs now, in future generations, when rank corruption masquerades as libery, it will be upon our shoulders. True patriots will then ask why we who were there to witness our nation at the crossroads did nothing.

At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity?

7th July, 1871.—I was annoyed by a woman frequently beating a slave near my house, but on my reproving her she came and apologized. I told her to speak softly to her slave, as she was now the only mother the girl had;

A headman who went with us plagued another chief to give me a goat; I refused to take what was not given willingly, but the slaves secured it; and I threatened our companion, Kama, with dismissal from our party if he became a tool in slave hands. The arum is common.

13th March, 1872.—Finished my letter to Mr. Bennett of the New York Herald, and Despatch No. 3 to Lord Granville. 14th March, 1872.—Mr. Stanley leaves. I commit to his care my journal sealed with five seals: the impressions on them are those of an American gold coin, anna, and half anna, and cake of paint with royal arms. Positively not to be opened.

Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren't lying around waiting to be discovered. They're made, not found.

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. "They are the ones who are sick," fumed Limbaugh.

Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.

While those of us in schools may wish to blame others for imposing constraints, many of our constraints are self imposed. Are we able to escape from these and respond to what we believe is best for our students? One