Quotes About Responsibility

But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden.

I bet you're rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.

you shouldn't try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself

Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then—stay in the marriage—was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over.

All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.

People who know but do not act do evil too. I don't know if I would call them evil but they're certainly not thinking about heaven.

Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. "If you don't, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you're asking for disaster.

When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn't hold them.

A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children. The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.

There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.

I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg.

Let him get stoned, since everybody must.

No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there's ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.

A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.

All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to.

As a manager, the more you talk about something without following up with action, the less those words will matter.

Great accountability is nothing more and nothing less than having the courage to demand that the people who work for you use their strengths in a responsible way. Learning

a manager inhabits the most interpersonally complex role in a modern organization, in many ways more complex than the CEO role.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.