Quotes About Responsibility

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing?

Today we have a temporary aberration called "industrial capitalism" which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital... the natural world and properly functioning societies. No sensible capitalist would do that.

Pity the mother who assumes the name without being all this implies!

God says to us "Some things won't get done unless you do them.

The body of Christ has no arms and feet, but ours. In other words, God needs us as much as we need God.

When we take our social role too seriously the first thing we lose is our sense of humor.

I'm not my brother's keeper" is the lie infecting our streets and our neighborhoods (Genesis 4:9). This lie alienates us from God and one another.

Anger at injustice is a hallmark of the prophets. We have the responsibility to speak the truth. If we don't witness to the crudeness and brutality of our society, which disregards the homeless, poor, hungry, and dispossessed, who will?

For intelligence officials, 9/11 was personal.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to believe that others behave badly because of their personality while we ourselves behave badly because of factors beyond our control. People often jump to blaming others while letting themselves off the hook. Drivers think that someone cutting them off must be a jerk rather than wondering if there's an emergency or some other reason requiring them to drive that way.

Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn't make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.

my mother must have said to me a hundred times that men needed to be handled right and a woman who couldn't handle her man had only herself to blame.

you notes, and defended him against all comers. I was as good a parent as I knew how to be, because there was something about the job that mattered to me (well, not "something": my own mother, who was a loving presence and a terrible cook but never protected me from anything or anyone, handicapped as she was by besetting anxiety).

Almost two-thirds of these six million people are women. Almost two-thirds of the caregivers for those Alzheimer's patients are also women.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept "no" or "it can't be done" for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

Sullenberger later wrote about [air traffic controller] Harten, "his words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn't going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.

Emphasizing interdependence lets people know that they're responsible for understanding how their tasks interact with other people's tasks. Interdependence encourages frequent conversations to figure out the impact their work is having on others and to convey in turn the impact others' work has on them. Interdependent work requires communication. In other words, when leaders frame the work they are emphasizing the need for taking interpersonal risks like sharing ideas and concerns.

I'm not holding myself out as a model, but I do believe that we in America can ask more of children than we typically do, and they will not only respond to the challenge, but thrive.

The manufacturing of most goods harms the environment in one way or another. The culprit is not the factory, but it is we who buy what it produces. Therefore we should think carefully about items we purchase.

So how do we sort it all out? The relationship between ethics and thrift can be summed up in just one sentence. It is wrong to save money at the expense of others. Period.

But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control.

Love like that is what they make movies about. It's the thing you're supposed to want, the answer to every question, the song that you're supposed to sing. But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control. Love doesn't break easily, I found. But people do.

I'm keeping a tight leash on the magic, though, because the last thing I want is for the two of us to wind up floating off the planet while we're messing around.