Quotes about responsibility

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. p. 89

The conservative aptitude for stressing the "individual responsibility" of all parties except themselves.

Ghyl laughed also. “If I'm too serious, you're too irresponsible.”

“Bah,” retorted Floriel. “Is the world responsible? Of course not! The world is random, vagrant, heedless. To be responsible is to be out of phase, to be insane!”

Ghyl pondered a moment. “This is perhaps the case, in a world left to itself. But society imposes order. Living in a society, it is not insane to be responsible.”

"But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things!"

"Like what?" said Adam suspiciously.

"Well ... you could bring all the whales back, to start with."

He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them, would it?"

She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes.

"An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you have me do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale."

"I don't see what's so t'riffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people," said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.

The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves—that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well.

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does.

Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in.

You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.

So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person.