Quotes About Responsibility

T]his is a bad thing that's going on," she told Moore, "and we all need to do something to try to fix it." On

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but an undertaking that made everything else possible.

You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.

A president sets a tone for the nation and helps tailor habits of heart and of mind.

My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.

The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.

But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, "Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect." When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?

all those who conduct themselves worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

One need not become a candidate (though that's certainly an option worth considering) or a political addict hooked on every twist and every turn and every tweet. But the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic.

Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.

Lincoln asked. "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!…I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us….If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!…I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us….If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." The

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.

His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.

from St. Luke: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.

to Congress for

This isn't fair, Dad," Jeb said. "This isn't fair to you." His father cut him off. "What are you talking about, fair?" Bush said. This was politics; this was real life. "Nobody owes us a damn thing. We're going to leave this city with our heads high and I don't want to hear that anymore." Bushes didn't whine. "Do your best and don't look back"—that was the code.

Lincoln said that he believed "the legitimate object of government is 'to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.'

position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.