Quotes about responsibility
page 19

“We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the 'body-and-mind' as a whole to the events of reality.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Modern Painter's World, ed. Robert Motherwell , Dyn, Nov. 1942, p. 9
1940s

Error, Feeling, Idea, Reality

“We cannot legislate responsibility. Self-regulation is the best option. I have crossed the line; I stand on the side of press freedom.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2009/0228_escudero2.asp 2009, Statement: I Stand by the Side of Freedom

Freedom

“In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem.. There is the "edge of history."”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

There would be a real New Age.
Up From Eden (1981)

Age, History

“The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Children, Sex, Behavior, Time

“Can you make honey, from nothing? How about a glass of milk, from nothing? How about a living leaf? Can you make a living frog, or a cat, a horse or a cow, from nothing? How about an eye? Make me a fully functioning eye, using no materials. Can you? Of course you can't. You don't even have an intelligent answer for how those came about. You would probably say that evolution is responsible for everything, but that it didn't make it from nothing. It made it from gases in space. Then where did the gases come from? You have to keep saying that there was something in the beginning, because basic science says that nothing can come from nothing.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Intelligence, Cats, Science, Horse

“Artistic responsibility? (Schliessmann answers using Bach performance as his example): After the rediscovery of Bach by Mendelssohn, Bach was interpreted in a very romantic style. This had nothing to do with Bach. Leopold Stokowski made arrangements for orchestra. O. K., the public had a chance to know the works, but it also had nothing to do with Bach. So Tureck and Gould - despite their substantial differences - came and made something completely radical. Only in this way was there a chance to ‘correct’ the ‘picture’ of interpretation and move in the right direction.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Way, Chance

“We had our domestic problems which resulted from the war. The chief of these was the care and relief of the afflicted veterans and their dependents. This was a tremendous task, on which about $3,000,000,000 has already been expended. No doubt there have been cases where the unworthy have secured aid, while the worthy have gone unrelieved. Some mistakes were inevitable, but our people and our Government have at all times been especially solicitous to discharge most faithfully this prime obligation. What is now being done is related to you in detail by General Hines, of the Veterans' Bureau, a public official of demonstrated merit, so that I shall not dwell upon it. During the past year, under the distinguished and efficient leadership of Commander Drain, the Legion itself has undertaken to provide an endowment fund of $5,000,000 to minister to the charitable requirements of their comrades. The response to this appeal has been most generous and the results appear most promising. The Government can do much, but it can never supply the personal relationship that comes from the ministrations of a private charity of that kind.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War, People, Problem, Affliction

“It is the natural desire of each nation to use the other as an instrument of its own purposes and policies. By dint of our mutual dependence, your influence is amplified by our power. Our power is made more responsible and more effective by your influence.”

Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1919–1988) American diplomat

On relations between the US and the UK, as quoted in "Kingman Brewster Jr., 69, Ex-Yale President and U.S. Envoy, Dies" in The New York Times (9 November 1988)

Nature, Dependency

“The other day [the President] said, I know you've had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. Would you like a puppy?”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

cited to the Los Angeles Times (16 May 1989)

Faith, Sense, Time

“To take what might seem an "objective", macro-economic approach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities—as if this were just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 314

World, Way, Behavior, Nature

“Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Nation Books, 2004): On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2004

“I accept responsibility for the camps, but as far as measures against the Jews, I had nothing to do with them. Those orders came from the RSHA. Himmler sent orders to Kaltenbrunner, who transmitted them to Mueller of the Gestapo, and the latter had the entire extermination program under him. That was the way all of Himmler's orders went. I did not participate in the murder of the Jews.”

Oswald Pohl (1892–1951) Head of the SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt

To Leon Goldensohn, June 5, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
"The Nuremberg Interviews"

Way

“Let us build a structure of peace in the world in which the weak are as safe as the strong — in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system — in which those who would influence others will do so by the strength of their ideas, and not by the force of their arms.
Let us accept that high responsibility not as a burden, but gladly — gladly because the chance to build such a peace is the noblest endeavor in which a nation can engage; gladly, also, because only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great Nation, and only if we remain a great Nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Second Inaugural Address (1973)

World, Peace, Home, Idea

“The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

Effort, Success

“One minute I'm robbing a dope house. Next minute I'm the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. I'm only 20, 19, with a lot of money. Who am I? What am I? I don't even know who I am. I'm just a dumb child who's being abused and robbed by lawyers. I'm just a dumb pugnacious fool. I'm just a fool who thinks he's someone. Then you tell me I should be responsible.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml;jsessionid=CEDUJVE3P05PLQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/sport/2002/05/01/sotys02.xml&page=2
On himself

Money, World, Fools, Thinking

“Today, for the first time in our long and chequered history, we find the whole of this vast land… brought together under the jurisdiction of one constitution and one union which takes over responsibility for the welfare of more than 320 million men and women who inhabit it.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

On 26 January 1950 when took over as the President of India after it was proclained by the 34th and last Governor-General of India, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari as a Republic. Source: BBC News: 1950: India becomes a republic http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/26/newsid_3475000/3475569.stm, BBC News, 26 January 2005

Women, Men, History, Time

“We stand today, I believe, in greater danger of a nuclear catastrophe than we faced during the Cold War. And I can explain why I believe that, but the first point I want to make, though, is that hardly anybody understands that. And because we don’t understand it, our policies are not responsive to those dangers. During the Cold War, at least we had, we understood the danger and were taking action to try to deal with it; we had very serious arms control discussions, for example. Today, it’s so far in the background that people don’t understand it at all, particularly the new generation of people who didn’t live through the Cold War. But it’s a very dangerous situation today. And the headlines, which are about North Korea, just emphasize the danger; but the greater danger, really, is–the ultimate danger–is some sort of an exchange between the United States and Russia today. That would lead not just to a great catastrophe, it would basically lead to the end of civilization. So that’s what’s at stake here: ending our civilization, and the nuclear weapons have the power to do that.”

William Perry (1927) American mathematician and businessman

" Former Defense Secretary Warns Civilization Is at Risk https://www.truthdig.com/articles/former-defense-secretary-william-j-perry-on-the-nuclear-threat/," interview by Robert Scheer, August 9, 2017

War, People, Understanding

“The vitality of the individual… depends on his success in fashioning a character resistant to the narrowing of experience, to the rigidity of response, and to the consequent constriction of possibility that surrender to a hardened version of what the self implies. "He was so extremely natural," said Santayana of William James, "that there was no way of telling what his nature was, or what came next." It is an observation that states an ideal, suitable to the ambitions of personality under democracy. The point is not to make war against habit or to make war against one self. It is to fashion a style of existence, a mode of the self, in which we lower our defenses enough to strengthen our readiness for the new, our attachment to life, and our love of the world.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 130

Love, Life, War, World

“In Low Countries a person meets indifference, which is the consequence of the assumption that everyone is responsible for their fate. Everyone keeps their own views, but there is no attempt to impose them on others.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Fate, Personality, Country, Indifference

“The European Union is not, in fact, a union at all, but a continent-wide political coup. What began as a common market has now metamorphosed by stealth into a supranational political dictatorship, a parasitical organism living on the backs of the European nation states, sucking their lifeblood and slowly killing them off; a bureaucratic tyranny that wants to "harmonize" out of existence the national identities that have made Europe a continent of genuine diversity and a cultural crucible whose values have shaped the entire western world. But they want to put a stop to all that in the European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and this is why European laws are never enacted in response to any kind of organic need in society, but as top-down directives intended to impose indiscriminate uniformity for its own sake.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Europe needs a revolution" (25 August 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=s3u9LB32YYM 2011

World, Law

“White southerners saw Lincoln as anti-slavery and his election as a direct threat to the survival of the peculiar institution. Are you going to tell me that they were stupid or deluded? Is that any way for white southerners to honor their ancestors, by ridiculing their intelligence? Indeed, Stephen Douglas' decision to accuse Lincoln of embracing racial equality tells us that playing the race, or racism, card in the 1850s was alive and well, because Douglas believed that he would gain political traction among racist Illinois voters, who were white, after all, by associating Lincoln with the cause of black equality. Lincoln's response was thus also an issue of political survival. So was his decision not to publicize his support for limited black suffrage in Louisiana in 1864. He advanced the idea in a private letter, but waited thirteen months until he made his sentiment public, and three days after he made that sentiment public, he fell victim to an assassin's bullet because that assassin could not bear the thought of black equality. Lincoln knew he lived in a racist America, North and South.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

Brooks D. Simpson. "Race and Slavery, North and South: Some Logical Fallacies" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/race-and-slavery-north-and-south-some-logical-fallacies/#comment-47560 (18 June 2011), Crossroads, WordPress 2010s

Stupidity, Way, Intelligence, Idea

“It is the social issues which unremittingly demand that I make a responsible personal effort and which also lay increasing claims on my physical and mental powers. For me, the moral difficulties lie in the continual pressure brought to bear on my friends and immediate family, pressure which is not directed against me personally but which at the same time is all around me. I have written about this on many occasions but, sad to report, all that I said before applies equally today. I am no professional politician — which is perhaps why I am continually obsessed by the question as to the purpose served by the work done by my friends and myself, as well as its final result. I tend to believe that only moral criteria, coupled with mental objectivity, can serve as a sort of compass in the cross-currents of these complex problems.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Nobel autobiography (1975)

Lie, Sadness, Family, Question

“By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Credo (1965)

Love, Family, Freedom, Dependency

“Twenty years ago, the business world was taken by surprise when the work pyramid was up-ended. Suddenly customers were on top and a flattened corporate hierarchy made front-line workers responsible for understanding and satisfying the customer’s every whim. Today, we’re poised for the natural sequel to that revolution. It’s time to focus on keeping workers satisfied — or at least engaged in their work.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Source: Profit Patterns (1999), p. 2.

World, Understanding, Business, Nature

“Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

People, Education, Way

“Public opinion* is the unseen product of education and practical experience. Education, in turn, is the function, in co-operation, of the family, the church and the school. If the family fails in its guiding influence and discipline and if the church fails in its religious instruction, then everything is left to the school, which is given an impossible burden to bear. It is just this situation which has arisen in the United States during the generation through which we are still passing. In overwhelming proportion, the family has become almost unconscious of its chief educational responsibility. In like manner, the church, fortunately with some noteworthy exceptions, has done the same. The heavy burden put upon the school has resulted in confused thinking, unwise plans of instruction and a loss of opportunity to lay the foundations of true education, the effects of which are becoming obvious to every one. Fundamental dis cipline, both personal and social, has pretty well disappeared, and, without that discipline which develops into self-discipline, education is impossible.
What are the American people going to do about it? If they do not correct these conditions, they are simply playing into the hands of the advocates of a totalitarian state, for that type of state is at least efficient, and it is astonishing to how many persons efficiency makes stronger appeal than liberty.
Then, too, we have many signs of an incapacity to understand and to interpret liberty, or to distinguish it from license. There is a limit to liberty, and liberty ends where license begins. It is very difficult for many persons to understand this fact or to grasp its implications. If we are to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of the press, why should we not be free to say and think and print whatever we like? The answer is that the limit between liberty and license must be observed if liberty itself is to last. To suppose, as many individuals and groups seem to do, that liberty of thought and liberty of speech* include liberty to agitate for the destruction of liberty itself, indicates on the part of such persons not only lack of common sense but lack of any sense o humor. If liberty is to remain, the barrier between liberty and license must be recognized and observed.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

People, Education, School, Family

“When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (2005)

Fear, Anger

“Arie de Geus is a former executive with Royal Dutch/Shell who, together with Peter M. Senge, is responsible for the development of the concept of the ‘learning organisation’. In the early 1990s it was Senge, through his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline (1990), who did most to disseminate and popularise the concept. More recently, however, de Geus has produced an important body of writing in his own right, notably The Living Company (1997), in which he takes an organic and holistic view of organisations and closely links their ability to learn with the extent to which they are integrated into their environment.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 55

Books, Learning

“It is important to be both a thinker and a doer and to have sense of responsibility. A theoretician who has no responsibility is withdrawn from the real world. His recommendations are made in a vacuum. Because he is not required to carry them out, they may be irresponsible and do harm. Similarly, those in charge — the doers — are often devoid of any real thought.
To find a purpose to life, on must be willing to act, to put excellence in one's work, and have concern for what is right ahead of personal safety. Life must be felt, not observed.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)

Life, World, Sense, Personality

“I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Feeling, Thinking, Change, Time

“Some see danger in bigness. They fear the concentration of economic power that it brings with it. That is in a degree true. It simply means, however, that industrial management must expand its horizons of responsibility. It must recognize that it can no longer confine its activities to the mere production of goods and services. It must consider the impact of its operation on the economy as a whole in relation to the social and economic welfare of the entire community. For years I have preached this philosophy. Those charged with great industrial responsibility must become industrial statesmen.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: "The Broadened Responsibilities of Industry's Executive," 1936, p. 358; Also in Sloan & Sparkes (1941, 145); Partly cited in: Roland Marchand (1997, p. 83)

Fear, Communication

“But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her intent to practice Hinduism.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Death, God, World, Beauty

“The easiest way in which one can put unintentional strains on the enemy is to have a force which looks "trigger-happy." The one circumstance under which almost all Soviet experts agree the Russians might strike is the one in which they feel they are anticipating a strike by us. It will be difficult for them to read our intentions. They will doubtless err on the side of caution. But it is not clear which side will look cautious, particularly if there is a crisis which creates apprehension. It will add a real element of stability if our posture is such that we do not look as if we have to be "trigger-happy" in order to survive. This is an important reason for not relying solely on quick reaction as a protection and for not having forces so vulnerable that we could lose most of them from a Russian first strike. Under some circumstances our vulnerability to a Russian first strike would both tempt the Russians to initiate a war and at the same time compel them, because they might feel that we would be tempted to pre empt for our own protection. If we are sufficiently vulnerable they might find it impossible to believe that we were willing, in this crisis to rely on their good will, morality; caution, or sense of responsibility as a protection.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

War, Happiness, Way, Feeling

“Could it be argued that if the Chinese revolution seems to be a response to the needs of rural society, whereas the Russian is an urbanized phenomenon, this difference corresponds to that which exists between the users of two different forms of written communication, the one archaic, the other alphabetic?”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Communication

“The safest refuge when dealing with urgent, ticklish problems is sought in shirking responsibility, in gaining time by the formation of Committees, with the requisite Sub-Committees to tackle the problem. It is the well-known practice of Promise, Pause, Prepare, Postpone and end by letting things alone. But this cannot last for ever. Now the secret of these Committees is that they consist of a group of men, who individually can do nothing, but collectively can meet and decide that nothing can be done, whilst they know that the best Sub-Committees consist of three persons, two of whom are always absent!”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Problem Solving

Men, Secret, Problem, Time

“The left side of the brain is responsible for speech, but then it would say that.”

Harry Hill (1964) English comedian, doctor

"Hooves" Live

“For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves. This idea is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as in the progressive increase of the solid or habitable parts of the earth from water; and in the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants; and is consonant to the idea of our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertion we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions.”

Erasmus Darwin book Zoonomia

Zoönomia, vol. 1 (1794).

Wisdom, Happiness, Idea, Water

“External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

American Acheivement interview (1996)

People, World, Hope, Sense

“If there is a single moment … to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration.”

Robert D. Richardson (1934) American historian

Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995)

Life, World

“Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state to provide assistance to the aged, unemployed and otherwise dependent. This change has had divergent results on the particular data under discussion. The availability of assistance from the state would clearly tend to reduce the need for private reserves and so to reduce private saving—it is equivalent, in terms of our hypothesis, to a reduction in the variance of transitory components.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957)

Age, Change, Dependency

“There is not and cannot possibly be any hard and fast antithesis between self-interest and care for others, for man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence. The founders of our religion made this a cornerstone of morality. The admonition: love they neighbour as thyself, and do as you would be done by, expresses this. You will note that it does not denigrate self, or elevate love of others above it. On the contrary, it sees concern for self and responsibility for self as something to be expected, and asks only that this be extended to others. This embodies the great truth that self-regard is the root of regard for one's fellows.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Greater London Young Conservatives (Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture - "Dimensions of Conservatism") (4 July 1977) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103411 Leader of the Opposition

Love, Truth, Family, Religion

“Another forerunner of modern organization theorists was Andrew Ure, a professor of chemistry. An enthusiastic proponent of “the factory system,” Ure (1835) took a step beyond Adam Smith. Whereas Smith’s pin factory was solely an example of division of labor, Ure pointed out that a factory poses organizational challenges. He asserted that every factory incorporates “three principles of action, or three organic systems”: (a) a “mechanical” system that integrates production processes, (b) a “moral” system that motivates and satisfies the needs of workers, and (c) a “commercial” system that seeks to sustain the firm through financial management and marketing. Harmonizing these three systems, said Ure, was the responsibility of managers.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: "The Origins of Organizational Theory," 2005, p. 149-150

Motivation

“Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

God, World, Behavior, Feeling

“Business is the highest evolution of consciousness, responsibility, and morality. No other living organism is even remotely able to function on a business level. The essences of business are honesty, effort, responsibility, integration, abstraction, conceptualization, objectivity, long-range planning, discipline, thought, control. Business creates essentially every major human value, ranging from the development of consciousness, language, mathematics, the arts, up to the electronic and biogenic revolutions.”

Frank R. Wallace (1932–2006) Philosopher, author, entrepreneur

Wallace, Frank. The Neo-Tech Discovery. Appendix F http://www.neo-tech.com/discovery/appendixf.html

Art, Mathematics, Business, Effort

“I condemn the lack of proper investigation of the massacres and the impunity of those responsible for them.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

UN experts urge Iraq to establish the whereabouts of the seven missing residents of Camp Ashraf http://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/un-experts-urge-iraq-to-establish-the-whereabouts-of-the-seven-missing-residents-of-camp-ashraf/. 2013

“Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It has received far less study than other key conservative tenets, like economic choice. This lack of attention is striking because personal responsibility is a defining assumption in American thought.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

Idea, Study, Personality

“It is bad because it is a negation of democracy … Worst of all is the imposition by parliamentary diktat of a change of responsible party in London government. There cannot be any justification for that. It immediately lays the Conservative Party open to the charge of the greatest gerrymandering in the last 150 years of British history.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (11 April 1984) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1984/apr/11/local-government-interim-provisions-bill opposing the 'paving Bill' preparing for abolition of the Greater London Council, 1984. Post-Prime Ministerial

Democracy, History, Change

“As a Christian, I feel morally obligated to assist others who are less fortunate. Following the Old Testament laws of tzedakah (charity and tithing), I believe that my responsibility begins with my immediate family and expands in successive rings to supporting my immediate neighborhood and church, to my community, and beyond, as resources allow. My philosophy is to give until it hurts in times of disaster.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 16.

Family, Law, Feeling, Communication

“Present party designations have become empty of all contents…Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Letter to Sir Francis Webster, president of the Montrose Burghs Liberal Association, quoted in 'Lord Morley On Modern Politics', The Times (11 May 1923), p. 12.

Money, Problem, Learning

“To Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking for explanations of political action, he maintained, we must seek them at the level of ‘the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality’. For critics of Namier such as Sir Herbert Butterfield, the only possible retort seemed to be to go back to a famous dictum of Lord Acton’s to the effect that ideas are often the causes rather than the effects of public events. But this response duly incurred the scorn of Namier and his followers for the alleged naiveté of supposing that political actions are ever genuinely motivated by the principles used to rationalise them.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 104

Music, Motivation, Idea

“The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

People, Democracy, Idea, Question

“It's a public library. If you don't like the book, magazine, CD-ROM or film, put it down and pick up something else. Libraries provide choice. Our responsibility is to have in our collection a broad range of ideas and information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

" Oak Lawn Library Vows to Keep Playboy on Shelf http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-23/news/0506230234_1_library-board-president-library-officials-magazine" by Jo Napolitano, Chicago Tribune (June 23, 2005)

Books, Idea

“"Life" in this "society" being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of "society" being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. [1].

Life, Women, Money, Sex

“SMITH & TINKER'S Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live. Manufactured only at our Works at Evna, Land of Ev. All infringements will be promptly Prosecuted according to Law.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Plate on back of Tik-Tok, in Ozma of Oz (1907), Ch. 4 : Tiktok the Machine Man
Later Oz novels

Law, Thinking, Perfection

“Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions.”

Dieter Wisliceny (1911–1948) SS-Hauptsturmführer

Quoted in "Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny" - Page 240 - by Edward Crankshaw - History - 1956

Time, Personality

“It's a simple fact, when you move from one color space to another color space, that if there's a value contrast you get a strong optical illusion. Strong value contrast can be expressive and dramatic. Like the difference between high or low volume or the low key and the high keys on the piano... Actually, if you're moving from one flat color to another flat color, if there's a difference of color – if one is matte and the other is shiny – that contrast of tactility can keep them visually in the same dimension. It keeps them adjacent – side by side... Another reason is that a matte color and a shiny, transparent color are emotionally different. If something is warm and fuzzy and dense we have a kind of emotional response to that. If something is clear and you can see through it, like yellow or green or red can be, we have a different emotional sensation from that. So there's an expressive difference you can get that gives you more expressive range.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Color, Strong

“We as officers, soldiers and our brothers from the police are responsible for the safety of Egyptians during the vote, before it and after. It's impossible for someone to stop you from voting or harm you in voting stations, or outside.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E. 2014

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

"Purely Personal Prejudices" http://books.google.com/books?id=DLcEAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+difference+between+patriotism+and+nationalism++is+that+the+patriot+is+proud+of+his+country+for+what+it+does+and+the+nationalist+is+proud+of+his+country+no+matter+what+it+does+the+first+attitude+creates+a+feeling+of+responsibility+but+the+second+a+feeling+of+blind+arrogance+that+leads+to+war%22&pg=PA228#v=onepage Strictly Personal (1953)

War, Feeling, Country

“Subjectively the possession of a role factor is felt as a 'mental set' which modifies all ordinary responses. The very same stimulus is perceived in a different way when one is in the role and when one is out of it… Technically, we handle this change of perception the same way in a role as in a mood—both of which can intrude on the ordinary personality — by this special factor, L, which can be called a modulator factor. A modulator factor comes into action only when the usual ordinary 'focal stimulus' comes into the orbit of a set of role cues which we may call the 'ambient' or surrounding stimulus.”

Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) British-American psychologist

Source: The Scientific Analysis of Personality, 1965, p. 160

Way, Mood, Change, Personality

“The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.
We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 3

World, History, Knowledge, Change

“I was always bothered by the idea of hitting a beautiful, living, innocent animal over the head, cutting him up into pieces, then shoving the pieces into my mouth. I finally made my decision to stop eating animals when I came upon a ritual slaughter scene during a visit to Israel. My experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi Holocaust had a profound impact on my subsequent life choices. I felt some guilt that I lived when so many others didn't, and a sense of duty to redeem my survival by assuming their share of responsibility for making this planet a better place to live for all its inhabitants.”

Alex Hershaft (1934) American activist

"Alex Hershaft", in People Promoting and People Opposing Animal Rights: In Their Own Words, ed. John M. Kistler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 145 https://books.google.it/books?id=kIgAi6k69IQC&pg=PA145.

Life, Beauty, Idea, Decision

“Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid's grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible. … Some attributed Asian-Americans' success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based — including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals.”

Dean Koontz book The Bad Place

Source: The Bad Place (1990), Chapter 32

School, Color, Freedom, Success

“[The workmethods had] evolved from the experience of successive generations… Each other, often being members of the same family; supervision was internal, having the quality of 'responsible autonomy.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 6

Family, Success

“Those who have not learnt from Gasteiz will be responsible for their own acts. Those who want to fight, will be fought. With all of its consequences. Stop being fool.”

Manuel Fraga Iribarne (1922–2012) Spanish politician

Mor al llit, impunement, Manuel Fraga, icona del franquisme i responsable dels assassinats de Gasteiz, 16th January 2012, Setmanari La Directa, 16th January 2012, catalan http://www.setmanaridirecta.info/noticia/noticia-fraga, Gasteiz Facts

Fools, Fight

“In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent. If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present. The current beliefs will reprogram and alter past experience. It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 359

Way, Imagination, Thinking, Change

“If anyone asks me who was responsible for the British policy leading up to the war, I should, as a Labour man myself, make a confession and say: "All of us". We refused absolutely to face the facts. When the issue came of arming or rearming millions of people in this country… we refused to face the real issue at a critical moment. But what is the good of blaming anybody? We cannot make our action retrospective whatever we do. We have to start from now and try to do the best we can.”

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) British labour leader, politician, and statesman

Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 373, col. 1362.
Speech in the House of Commons, 29 July 1941.

War, People, Country

“Such is the real distribution of duties, responsibilities, and expenses. Yet people are given to thinking and speaking of the National Government as 'the Government'. They demand more from it than it was ever intended to provide; and yet in the same breath they complain that Federal authority is stretching itself over areas which do not concern it. On one side, there are demands for more amendments to the Constitution. On the other, there is too much opposition to those that already exist.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Thinking

“[S]ent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

Question

“I was educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph 2 are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, r, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

Love, Life, Pain, Hate

““Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.”

Roy Spencer (1955) American meteorologist

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade? http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

Search, Nature, Time

“With the sure sagacity of a leader of men, Washington at once selected, for the highest and most responsible stations, the three chief Americans who represented the three forces in the nation which alone could command success in the institution of the government. Hamilton was the head, Jefferson was the heart, and John Jay was the conscience. Washington's just and serene ascendancy was the lambent flame in which these beneficent powers were fused, and nothing less than that ascendancy could have ridden the whirlwind and directed the storm that burst around him.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

As quoted in Manual Of Patriotism : For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York (1900) By Charles Rufus Skinner, p. 261.

Men, Success, Heart

“If you want to take drugs and drink alcohol and smoke, that's your business. But if you want me to pay for it when you get sick, that's my business. If we're going to have universal health care, why don't we have universal auto care? I mean, if you run your car into a tree, the government buys you a new car. You back into somebody in the parking lot and scratch it. Hey, that's OK. The government will fix it. You blow up your engine 'cause you forgot to change the oil. That's OK. The government will fix it. Why don't we have universal house care? See, if you've ever owned a house and rented it out to somebody else, you will understand. How many know what I'm talking about? Renters just don't look at it the same way owners do, do they? And when it's your responsibility to take care of your health, you'll take care of it.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Health, Alcohol, Cars, Way

“Delegation means the conferring of a specified authority by a higher authority. In its essence it involves a dual responsibility. The one to vhom responsibility is delegated becomes responsible to the superior for doing the job. but the superior remains responsible for getting the Job done. This principle of delegation is the center of all processes in formal organization. Delegation is inherent in the very nature of the relation between superior and subordinate. The moment the objective calls for the organized effort of more than one person, there is always leadership with its delegation of duties.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 17

Nature, Effort, Personality

“Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)

Life, Men, God, World

“What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 3.10

Housing

“The evidence of racial bias comes not only from statistics, but also from remarks made by police, city and court officials. A thorough examination of the records – including a large volume of work emails – shows a number of public servants expressing racist comments or gender discrimination; demonstrating grotesque views and images of African Americans in which they were seen as the “other,” called “transient” by public officials, and characterized as lacking personal responsibility.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Personality

“Only a few generations have been granted the role of determining whether a revolution in communication will allow our better angels – or our darker angels – to win. You leave here with incredible opportunity, but also with immense responsibility.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Dalhousie University Commencement Speech (2017)

Angels, Communication

“Direction is a lot of responsibility. But if you've been trained under Balachander as I have, it's a lot easier. You have everything down on paper before you start shooting. By now while directing I am experienced enough to know my moves.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

Training

“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

General Survey
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)

Fear, Nature

“Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La faute des hommes supérieurs est de dépenser leurs jeunes années à se rendre dignes de la faveur. Pendant qu'ils thésaurisent, leur force est la science pour porter sans effort le poids d'une puissance qui les fuit; les intrigants, riches de mots et dépourvus d'idées, vont et viennent, surprennent les sots, et se logent dans la confiance des demi-niais.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart

Men, Youth, Confidence, Idea

“It is the responsibility of each of us—every man, woman, and child on this planet—to try to lessen the total amount of suffering in our world. … Speciesism, like racism, is a learned attitude, and both can be unlearned.”

Seba Johnson (1973) Olympic skier

"Taking the Lessons My Mother Taught Me to the African-American Community" http://www.satyamag.com/oct02/johnson.html, Satya (October 2002).

World, Suffering, Learning

“What kind of a society is this where a person can’t express attraction without fearing that they’re going to be murdered for it? If the person who came out with the secret was a Jewish woman or a black woman or an Asian woman, and he went over to her house the next day and killed her because he was so repulsed and she had embarrassed him that way on national television, nobody would be writing stories on the TV show’s responsibility. Everyone would be writing stories about this racist, this anti-Semite.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

The New York Times, 1995 [Remembering Jeff Montgomery, LGBTQ rights advocate, Ennis, Dawn, LGBTQ Nation, July 19, 2016, 2016-07-19, http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/07/remembering-jeff-montgomery-lgbtq-rights-advocate/]

Secret, Fear, Way, Housing

“So, it is true that one’s homeland is entirely human, emotional and that it is the root of action, of authority, of responsibility from which one can build Europe. What elements? Well, [nation] States, because only States are valid, are legitimate, in this respect, in addition they are capable of… As I have already said and I repeat, that at the present time, there cannot be any other Europe than that of the States, apart of course from myths, fictions, parades. From this solidarity depends all hope of uniting Europe in the political field and in the field of defense, as in the economic field. From this solidarity depends, therefore, the destiny of Europe as a whole, from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Alors, il est vrai que la Patrie est un élément humain, sentimental et que c’est sur des éléments d’action, d’autorité, de responsabilité qu’on peut construire l’Europe. Quels éléments? Eh bien, les États, car il n’y a que les États qui, à cet égard, soient valables, soient légitimes et en outre soient capables de réaliser… J’ai déjà dit et je répète, qu’à l’heure qu’il est, il ne peut pas y avoir d’autre Europe possible que celle des États, en dehors naturellement des mythes, des fictions, des parades. De cette solidarité dépend tout espoir d’unir l’Europe dans le domaine politique et dans le domaine de la défense, comme dans le domaine économique. De cette solidarité dépend, par conséquent, le destin de l’Europe tout entière, depuis l’Atlantique jusqu’à l’Oural.
Press conference, Elysée Palace, Paris, 15 May 1962
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2

Hope, Time, Dependency

“We are not responsible for what might be done with the weapons we give to the Palestinians. We give them to the Palestinians because we believe in their cause and we believe we have a duty to help them. What happens afterwards is none of my business. If I am to be found guilty by proxy, I prefer charges that are direct. But there is no proof.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Oriana Fallaci (2 December 1979), Corriere della Sera
Interviews

Business, Help

“What we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 12 (p. 359)

People, Law, Hope, Freedom

“Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Literature, Idea, Past

“Supposing I'm now 21, 22, what would I do? I would not be absorbed in wanting to change life in Singapore. I'm not responsible for Singapore…Why should I go and undertake this job and spend my whole life pushing this for a lot of people for whom nothing is good enough? I will have a fall-back position, which many are doing - have a house in Perth or Vancouver or Sydney, or an apartment in London, in case I need some place suddenly, and think about whether I go on to America.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

SM Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Life, People, Thinking, Change

“The explanation of this book is that the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U. S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:(1) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
(2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long term lending;
(3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
(4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;
(5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.”

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003) American economic historian

The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (2nd ed., 1986), Ch. 14 : An Explanation of the 1929 Depression

Books

“One must be prepared to reject not only the schema of the physical library, which is essentially a response to books and their proliferation, but the schema of the book itself, and even that of the printed page as a long term storage device, if one is to discover the kinds of procognitive systems needed in the future.”

J. C. R. Licklider Libraries of the future

As cited in: Ching-chih Chen (1980) Quantitative measurement and dynamic library service. p. 52.
Libraries of the future, 1965

Books, Future

“You — yourself — said on many occasions, one of them in the UN General Assembly, I was witness to that personally, that America is not responsible for the security of other peoples. That America helps only. This is the right logic.”

Muammar Gaddafi book The Green Book

The Green Book (1975), Letter to Barack Obama

People, Help, Personality

“In fact, the legal system is in part responsible for their very size and growth. And too often when the individual finds himself in conflict with these forces, the legal system sides with the giant institution, not the small businessman or private citizen.”

Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) United States Senator

On big business and big government; speech before American Bar Association, New York (August 8, 1978), reported in Alan F. Pater, Jason R. Pate, What They Said in 1978 (1979), p. 168.

Parting

“A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

58 min 56 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Traveller's Tales [Episode 6]

Life, World, Home

“For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 1847 p. 197-198
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Purity of Heart (1847)

God

“A trustee has a responsibility to guard the assets of others with a higher degree of care than he does his own.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 31

“Canada regards herself as responsible to all mankind for the peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic archipelago. We do not doubt for a moment that the rest of the world would find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

House of Commons Debate (24 October 1969)

World, Water

“For Moses, that God should "visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation" (Exod. 20:5) is an unacceptable form of group punishment akin to the morally indiscriminate punishment of Sodom. Challenging God's pronouncement of the punishment of the sons for the sins of the fathers, Moses argues with God, against God, and in the name of God. Moses engages God with fierce moral logic:
Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteousness of Abraham and the idol worship of his father Terach. Does it make moral sense to punish the child for the transgressions of the father? Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteous deeds of King Hezekiah, who sprang from the loins of his evil father King Achaz. Does Hezekiah deserve Achaz's punishment? Consider the nobility of King Josiah, whose father Amnon was wicked. Should Josiah inherit the punishment of Amnon? (Num. Rabbah, Hukkat XIX, 33)
Trained to view God as an unyielding authoritarian proclaiming immutable commands, we might expect that Moses will be severely chastised for his defiance. Who is this finite, errant, fallible, human creature to question the explicit command of the author of the Ten Commandments? The divine response to Moses, according to the rabbinic moral imagination, is arresting:
By your life Moses, you have instructed Me. Therefore I will nullify My words and confirm yours. Thus it is said, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers."”

Harold M. Schulweis (1925–2014) American rabbi and theologian

Deut. 24:16
Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (2008)

Life, Death, God, Children

“He could not endure what he found himself going through, and he could not get away. It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custom-made unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her — and everyone else — together. In a knot which could never be undone, so long as they lived.
No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.”

Philip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Source: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), Chapter 5 (p. 54)

Death, People, Light

“The office of Speaker is almost as ancient as Parliament itself. It emerged in the Middle Ages when the Commons - the ordinary people - of England needed a spokesman in their dealings with the King, someone who would voice their grievances and present their petitions. This was by no means a safe or easy thing to do at that time, and potential spokesman generally had to be pressured into accepting the responsibility.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 4, The Office of Speaker of the House of Commons, p. 46

People, Age, Time

“Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Address to the Prague World Congress of International PEN Club (7 November 1994) http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/wipcnews/peninternationaldeeplysaddenedbydeathofvclavhavelaconstantchampionforfreedomofexpression/

World, Feeling

“Encapsulation is the key to increasing the value of such software metrics as reusability, refinability, testability, maintainability, and extensibility. Object-oriented languages provide a number of mechanisms for improving encapsulation, but it is during the design phase that the greatest leverage can be realized.
The data-driven approach to object-oriented design focuses on the structure of the data in a system. This results in the incorporation of structural information in the definitions of classes. Doing so violates encapsulation.
The responsibility-driven approach emphasizes the encapsulation of both the structure and behavior of objects. By focusing on the contractual responsibilities of a class, the designer is able to postpone implementation considerations until the implementation phase.
While responsibility-driven design is not the only technique addressing this problem, most other techniques attempt to enforce encapsulation during the implementation phase. This is too late in the software life-cycle to achieve maximum benefits.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 75: Conclusion

Life, Behavior, Problem

Quotes about responsibility page 19

Quotes about responsibility
page 19