Quotes About Responsibility

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity.

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are the traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don't take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them...

We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.

I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look.

But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings.

When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?

Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

I'm telling you all of this because I'll never be your father, and you will always be my child.

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world.

And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I?

In the meantime, while I think-while you think, while we think-our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.

Wir können uns nicht mit Unwissenheit herausreden, nur mit Gleichgültigkeit.

If you want to know who protects you from the people that take without asking, it is the police. If you want to know who protects you from the police, it is the people who take without asking. And very often they are the same people.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

La vergüenza es la sensación que nos invade cuando olvidamos casi por completo, pero no del todo, las expectativas sociales y nuestras obligaciones para con los otros, a cambio de nuestra satisfacción inmediata.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Every time you make a decision about food, Paul pleaded, quoting Berry, "you are farming by proxy.