Quotes About Responsibility

A servant's too often a negligent elf; if it's business of consequence, do it yourself!

Let him then have powers commensurate with his utmost possible need, only let him be held strictly responsible for the exercise of them. Any other course would be injustice as well as bad policy

With all my imperfections on my head," I joined the crew, and we hauled out into the stream, and came to anchor for the night.

A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms.

No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.

Society takes enormous trouble over who is allowed to adopt a child, but none about who is allowed to produce one. This has led the psychologist David Lykken to suggest that parents should have to get a licence before child-bearing, or otherwise risk the danger that their child will be taken away for adoption.

I meant to do my work today but . . .

The man who goes to the top is the man who has something to say and says it when circumstances warrant. Men who keep silent underdressed are moral cowards.

The world was created for Mankind, not for some of mankind.

He brushed his teeth carefully and used dental floss. He tried to take good care of his teeth because he was his own dentist now. Some things could go to pot, but not his health, he thought. Then why don't you stop pouring alcohol into yourself? he thought. Why don't you shut the hell up? he thought.

He knew he should burn up the paper plates and utensils too, and dust the furniture and wash out the sinks and the bathtub and toilet, and change the sheets and pillowcase on his bed; but he didn't feel like it. For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.

People are not punished for their deeds, but by them~

He who lives under it and is disloyal to it is a traitor to the human race everywhere.

We [the military personnel here] serve the flag. The trade we all follow is the give and take of death. It is for that purpose that the American people maintain us. Any one of us who believes he has a job like any other, for which he draws a money wage, is a thief of the food he eats and a trespasser of the bunk in which he lies down to sleep.

When I fume in the tollbooth line, I am not a good person to whom a bad thing is happening. I am a liar who is getting what he deserves.

Child-rearing is not some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life. And we must do it by ourselves, one by one.

Royal[s] can't manage on their own.

What makes my life my own is ultimately the sheer fact that it is mine to live, mine to make something of, in the face of my possible non-existence. Every other possibility is something that I may be free not to do, and that someone else may be able to do just as well as I can. But my death is a possibility that necessarily faces me alone: no one can face it for me.

Paying bills is hard, and dealing with a teen makes life even harder.

What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

If you're holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It's a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren't alone, and they never have been.