Quotes About Responsibility

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty.

The strength of a nation lies in the homes of its people

In leaving the people's business in their hands, we cannot be wrong.

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my best each and every day.

Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty. And I intend no modification to my oft expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free. (The Prayer of Twenty Millions 1862)

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And

As the launch date grew near, Haig seemed to interpret everything around him in military terms of obedience and duty. When Lady Haig told him that she was expecting their third child, he wrote back, without any trace of jest or irony, "How proud you must feel that you are doing your duty at this time by having a baby and thereby setting a good example to all other females!

A sense of rights can be contagious

Only half a dozen years earlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted with satisfaction how "the incorrigible deserters . . . were well flogged and chained.

What made it so easy for Haig to demand high casualties was that he chose not to see them. He "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations," wrote his son, "because these visits made him physically ill.

Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?

In other words, we must all be prepared to answer to Uber's children.

Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that?

for which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent.

Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense. "It forces you to take responsibility for them," she says.

Who wants a leader who wants to be leader? And I could see his point there. I've always sort of thought we ought to keep a close eye on anyone who wants power over others.