Quotes about Responsibility

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.

In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script-without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.

A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Now, don't you worry, Mr. Appledore. I'm thinkin' the best thing I can do is to trundle the old lady down to my mother and take her out of your way, otherwise you might be findin' your Christian feelings gettin' the better of you some fine day, and there's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

This, she felt, was her fault. Her idea in the first place. Her house. Her honeymoon. Her — and this was the incalculable factor in the thing — her husband. (A repressive word, that, when you came to think of it, compounded of a grumble and a thump.) The

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.