Quotes about responsibility

'The time has now come for us to cease to behave like a lot of irresponsible children letting off fireworks in a crowded hall.'

10th Juror: What do you want?

8th Juror: Nothing. I just want to talk.

7th Juror: Well, what's there to talk about? Eleven men here agree. Nobody had to think twice about it, except you.

10th Juror: I want to ask you something. Do you believe his story?

8th Juror: I don't know whether I believe it or not. Maybe I don't.

7th Juror: So what'd you vote "not guilty" for?

8th Juror: There were eleven votes for "guilty." It's not easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.

7th Juror: Who says it's easy for me?

8th Juror: No one.

7th Juror: What, just because I voted fast? I think the guy's guilty. You couldn't change my mind if you talked for a hundred years.

8th Juror: I'm not trying to change your mind. It's just that we're talking about somebody's life here. I mean, we can't decide in five minutes. Suppose we're wrong?

Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me-that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe. I had to stop playing a part in my own misery. I had to save my own life. (p129)

The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, "After all, it's her life." However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her.

In any civilized society, it is the individual or group who creates a problem that must have responsibility for solving it.

Why is it people like us have to be the galaxy’s conscience?”

“If you can see a problem, and you have the ability to fix it, it becomes your responsibility. It’s always been that way.”

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. Everybody's crew.

The discovery of freedom, for instance, means little if we are not empowered to act, to be free for something, not just from something. As fear falls away, we are less afraid of power's Siamese twin, responsibility.

"He had won the victory over himself," says the concluding line of George Orwell's grim novel, 1984. "He loved Big Brother." Just as hostages sometimes become fond of their abductors, we become attached to the factors that imprison us: our habits, customs, the expectations of others, rules, schedules, the state. Why do we give away our power or never claim it at all? Perhaps so that we can avoid decisions and responsibility. We are seduced by pain-avoidance, conflict avoidance.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Everything looked so good in the computer, and yet what Father had gotten was not Medicine but Health Care-- Medicine without a soul. What do I mean by "soul"? I mean what Father did not get. Presence. Attention. Judgment. Kindness. Above all, responsibility.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.