Quotes About Responsibility

We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them.

We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.

confidently, "President

Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them.

In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day.

About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.

Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made. -The Gay Old Dog

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.

the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.

thanking them for coming, and reminding Con to give the dog a bit of something when he gets home late, she forgets altogether to hand him the letter. Holding it after he has left she thinks of the many crucial things left unsaid.

a mammy's boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.

We proceed in this society of ours on the possibly valid but untrue assumption that the public knows what it wants-- indeed, that it is given sufficient information about what is available to make such a judgment. And then we jump, irresponsibly and absurdly, to the notion that there is a valid relationship between what the public wants and what it should want.

But be careful about the parts you agree to play...You never know when one is going to stick.

Do you like being a cop? I love it, when it doesn't suck, sir.

Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.

the daughter of Count Saturninus was chosen to discharge the obligations of her country.

Oh, you know, fantasy I've always found a word I really don't care for. Fantasy always strikes me as something that doesn't have any reality because it's completely irresponsible. Anything that is fantastic I don't think is really terribly interesting. What's the Coleridge distinction between imagination and - is it fantasy? I don't think that's the word. Anyway, you know, one is meaningful and one isn't.

Corporations must serve the people, Americans thought.

What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

On the sale of Essence Communications Inc: What I would first learn is something that Suzanne de Passe, the legendary Hollywood producer who headed Motown Productions, commented on thirty years ago when there was talk of Motown being sold: 'In a certain way black people seem to feel that black companies owe them something extra, the kind of something extra that cannot be given if you want to stay in business.

Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave . . . if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed you will need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter