Responsibility Quotes

The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.

~ Ayn Rand

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

~ Max Brooks

Why was I chosen?''Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

If I was going to act irresponsibly, the least I could do was be responsible for it.

~ Danny Wallace

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

~ D.h. Lawrence

It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.

~ Stephen King

‎With adulthood comes responsibility.

~ Mary Lydon Simonsen

The capacity for love that makes dogs such rewarding companions has a flip-side: They find it difficult to cope without us. Since we humans programmed this vulnerability, it's our responsibility to ensure that our dogs do not suffer as a result.

~ John Bradshaw

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

~ Derrick Jensen

We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns.

~ Aaron Sorkin

Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

~ Philip K. Dick

She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.

~ Robin Mckinley

Until you accept responsibility for your life, someone else runs your life.

~ Orrin Woodward

A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.

~ Criss Jami

Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.

~ Hyman G. Rickover

Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility

~ Naomi Novik

In the end there is nothing to be done but to state clearly what has been done, without shame or regret, and say: Here I am, and this is what I am. Now deal with me as you see fit. That is your right. Mine is to stand by the act, and pay the price.You do what you must do, and pay for it. So in the end all things are simple.

~ Ellis Peters

Honor is no phantom. Duty doesn't melt away, no matter how much we might wish it to.

~ Claudia J. Edwards

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.[Henry V, Act IV Scene I]

~ William Shakespeare

You'll get into dreadful trouble and it won't be my fault. You are bad people.

~ Terry Pratchett

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes — as it is already to a large extent — no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.

~ Italo Calvino

The hammer never complains of the noise.

~ Marty Rubin

Anyone can change the world and everyone should try.

~ Chantal Wiebe

Sometimes it isn't easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn't turn wrong into right or stupid into smart.

~ Jim Butcher

The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties, and his place in a world. He saw that world as a place so full of turning gears he had no hope of comprehending how things fit together, so why even try?Now things were different, however. Now he wasn’t just looking out from inside of the clockwork. Instead, he was actually seeing the final motion of the escapement—the ticking hands of the clock itself.And it was a doomsday clock.Both his feline and human instincts told him to let it be. It was not his problem, or his place to interfere. If the living world was destined to fall, let it happen, let it pass into history once and for all. Who was he to try to save it?But on the other hand, if the living world were lost, then there would never again be great cats to furjack . . . and couldn’t it be that hearing the actual ticking of the clock gave one the responsibility to stop it?

~ Neal Shusterman

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

~ Clay Shirky

Love is active, not passive. It is our love for one another, for Mother Earth, for our fellow creatures that compels us to act on their behalf.

~ Laurence Overmire

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense.

~ Massad Ayoob

It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

I should try to pass along the good that has happened to me. That’s my responsibility as being part of this planet.

~ Jameson Currier

Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.

~ Louise Penny

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.

~ Thornton Wilder

She knew his secret: for all his wandering, his independence and his unorthodox ways, he took his responsibilities very seriously. He even borrowed others' responsibilities, making them his own simply because he thought this sort of service was owed to those whom he loved.

~ Meredith Duran

‎If there is no discipline, there is anarchy. Good citizenship demands attention to responsibilities as well as rights.

~ Joe Clark

She nodded without conviction, wishing she could be so carefree, and not the sort of person for whom an unanswered letter gnawed away at the back of her mind. Nobody liked a stick-in-the-mud...but they liked all the things sticks-in-the-mud did for them, didn't they? They liked not having to worry because someone else, someone who couldn't sleep when she had left a duty unperformed, would make sure that nothing too terrible happened.

~ Rose Lerner

A moment when the worst had already happened, so there was nothing left to worry about. I wanted to stop forever in that pause between cause and effect. A place where I didn’t have to be responsible for everybody all of the time.

~ Jo Furniss

It is naturally a sign of inner liberation when a patient can squarely recognize his difficulties and take them with a grain of humor. But some patients at the beginning of analysis make incessant jokes about themselves, or exaggerate their difficulties in so dramatic a way that they will appear funny, while they are at the same time absurdly sensitive to any criticism. In these instances humor is used to take the sting out of an otherwise unbearable shame.

~ Karen Horney

Make good boundaries your goal. They are your right, your responsibility, your greatest source of dignity.

~ Elaine N. Aron