Sunday, October 5, 2019 – Taking Responsibility
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility. ~ Peter Drucker
There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast. ~ Viktor E. Frankl
I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind. ~ Grover Cleveland
Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star. ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911
It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities. ~ Josiah Charles Stamp
I am responsible only to God and history. ~ Francisco Franco
Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself – he imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, and makes it his own. ~ Charles de Gaulle
The great thought, the great concern, the great anxiety of men is to restrict, as much as possible, the limits of their own responsibility. ~ Giosué Borsi
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. ~ Erica Jong
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs. ~ Joan Didion
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. ~ Grover Cleveland
There are always those who think they know what your responsibility is better than you do. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every woman needs one man in her life that is strong and responsible. Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to do – fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible. ~ Richard Needham
The other day the President said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused and then said, would you like a puppy? ~ Dan Quayle
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. ~ C. S. Lewis
Duty is what one expects from others. ~ Oscar Wilde
Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else. ~ Ivern Ball
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself. ~ Franz Kafka
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. ~ George Burns
Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary. ~ Blaise Pascal
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world. ~ Georges Duhamel
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it. ~ Don Marquis
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible. ~ Lillian Hellman
Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong. ~ Winston Churchill
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. ~ Theodor Adorno
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
The man with the ball is responsible for what happens to the ball. ~ Branch Rickey
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him. ~ Booker T. Washington
Responsibility’s like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight. ~ William McPhee, Casuals of the Sea, 1916
Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. ~ M. Scott Peck
To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education. ~ William Glasser
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility. ~ Ambrose Bierce
There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. ~ Elizabeth Warren
Freedom isn’t free. It shouldn’t be a bragging point that “Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn’t insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable. ~ Bill Maher
Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed. ~ P. J. O’Rourke
The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using; in its broad, current definition, it’s a euphemism for sarcasm. ‘I’m not being sarcastic; I’m being ironic.’ No, you’re not. You’re evading the responsibility for being sarcastic. ~ Richard Corliss
To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that. ~ David Byrne
“People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors. ~ Jonas Salk
Just Above Sunset 