"If we are worried about the future, then we must look today at the upbringing of children."
— Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)

"The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility."
— John Lennon

"This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do."
— Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith)

"The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth."
— Chief Seattle (Chief Seattle's Speech)

"In dreams begin responsibilities."
— William Butler Yeats

"This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait."
— Natalie Goldberg

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."
— Colin Powell (On Leadership)

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Responsibility and Trust -- these two are like Yin and Yang, together perfectly complete, and each one requiring the presence of the other.

The next time you mistrust someone, consider this -- does that person feel responsible for you in any way? If the answer is yes, then go ahead and trust them. Very likely, they are looking out for your best interest. "
— Vera Nazarian

"Fix the problem, not the blame. "
— Japanese proverb

"If you want to see a man come to his senses, try something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I'm not on the pill?"
— Catherine Ryan Hyde (Pay It Forward)

"The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got
responsibilities.'"
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"Responsibility is a grace you give yourself not an obligation"
— Dan Millman

"When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit."
— Robert Rodriguez (Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player)

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
(1856 - 1950)"
— George Bernard Shaw

"You'll get into dreadful trouble and it won't be my fault. You are bad people."
— Terry Pratchett (Johnny and the Dead)

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other."
— Carl Schurz

"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."
— Stanley Milgram

"The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad."
— Kevin Sites (In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty-one Wars)

"Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works."
— Alexander Shulgin (Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story)

"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

"Rwanda will never ever leave me. It's in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and killed that I know of, and many that I didn't know. … Fifty to sixty thousand people walking in the rain and the mud to escape being killed, and seeing a person there beside the road dying. We saw lots of them dying. And lots of those eyes still haunt me, angry eyes or innocent eyes, no laughing eyes. But the worst eyes that haunt me are the eyes of those people who were totally bewildered. They're looking at me with my blue beret and they're saying, "What in the hell happened? We were moving towards peace. You were there as the guarantor" -- their interpretation -- "of the mandate. How come I'm dying here?" Those eyes dominated and they're absolutely right. How come I failed? How come my mission failed? How come as the commander who has the total responsibility-- We learn that, it's ingrained in us, because when we take responsibility it means the responsibility of life and death, of humans that we love."
— Roméo Dallaire

"Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it."
— Cardinal Newman

"Every excuse I ever heard made perfect sense to the person who made it. "
— Dr. Daniel T. Drubin

"The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle."
— Vaclav Havel

"Tragische Schuld verkörpert sich im permanenten Konflikt zwischen der uralten religiösen Vorstellung von der Missetat als einer Beschmutzung, die einer ganzen Rasse anhaftet und unausweichlich von einer Generation auf die nächste vererbt wird [...], und dem neuen vom Gesetz übernommenen Konzept, nach dem der Schuldige definiert wird als Privatperson, die sich aus eigenem Antrieb und unter keinem Zwang stehend entschlossen hat, ein Verbrechen zu begehen."
— Jean-Pierre Vernant (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece)

"Geschichte lebt nicht, wenn man ihr keine Heimat im Bewusstsein gibt; sie ist eine Last, die kein freier Mensch zu tragen gezwungen werden kann."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"In der gegenwärtigen 'Kultur' geben sich wenige die Mühe, zwischen Aufrichtigkeit und dem Vorspielen von Aufrichtigkeit zu unterscheiden - ja, wenige sind zu dieser Unterscheidung überhaupt in der Lage -, wie auch nur wenige zwischen religiösem Glauben und dem Einhalten religiöser Vorschriften unterscheiden."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"Responsibility is the thing people dread the most of all. Yet it is the one thing in the world that develops us, gives us manhood or womanhood fiber."
— Frank Crane

"Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp pf action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own."
— General Charles DeGaule

"Was die Menschen täglich ihre Entscheidungen nennen, ist nichts weiter als ein gut einstudiertes Spiel."
— Juli Zeh (Spieltrieb.)

"Wenn ein Mann alt genug ist, um unrecht zu tun, so sollte er alt genug sein, um recht zu tun."
— Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)

"Treue gegen sich selbst und Gütigkeit gegen Andere: Darin ist alles befasst."
— Confucius (Gespräche ( Lun- Yu).)

"Vertraue einem edlen Charakter mehr als einem Eid."
— Solon

"[D]ie Leute [lesen] nichts, was sie nicht interessiert, und wenn sie etwas interessier[t], [sind] sie auch reif dafür."
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)

"Our whole social order could self-destruct over the obsession with freedom disconnected from responsibility; where choice is imagined to be somehow independent of consequences."
— Boyd K. Packer

"We're not responsible, he thought. This planet is a temporary affair. It's whizzing with all kinds of other ones, a whole range of planetary stuff, toward a star in the Milky Way. On that kind of a planet we're not responsible, he thought."
— Bertolt Brecht

"[Wer fällt] fällt für die vor ihm, die obgleich schneller und sicherer im Schritt, den Stein des Anstoßes nicht entfernten."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Religion ist nichts anderes als die Lehre davon, wie man frei von Erkenntnis gehorcht [...]."
— Juli Zeh (Spieltrieb.)

"Handle so, daß die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne."
— Immanuel Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Prolegomena, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten & Metaphyische Anfangssgründe der Naturwissenschaft)

"Bedauern ist die Trübung des Geistes und nicht seine Läuterung."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others."
— Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness)

"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 (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load."
— Robert Frost

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality."
— Ayn Rand