Skip to content Skip to footer

Quotes About Responsibility

We must exchange the philosophy of excuse–what I am is beyond my control–for the philosophy of responsibility.

Barbara Charline Jordan

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than raising of the next generation.

C. Everett Koop

Dedication and responsibility, Far beyond the laws governed by man, Releases the power within you, To attain all the wisdom of the universe.

Christine Lane

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Cyril Connolly

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’.

Dan Quayle

I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself; that my future lay in my own hands.

Darius Ogden Mills

I am only one, But still I am one. I cannot do everything, But still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

Forming characters Whose Our own or others Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence.

Elihu Burritt

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.

Erik H. Erickson

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Eugenio Montale

Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.

Fred Woodworth

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.

Fritz Perls

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Bernard Shaw

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

George Orwell

No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.

Gerald W. Johnson

If you don’t accept responsibility for your own actions, then you are forever chained to a position of defense.

Holly Lisle

You have given me a great responsibility to stay close to you, to be worthy of you and to exemplify what you are.

James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr.

Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self respect springs.

Joan Didion

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility-I welcome it.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility

Lee Iacocca

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this Deny your responsibility.

Lyndon B. Johnson

A man who enjoys responsibility usually gets it. A man who merely likes exercising authority usually loses it.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility… in the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.

Michael Korda

I am here to accept responsibility for that which I did. I will not accept responsibility for that which I did not do.

Oliver L. North

There are always those who think they know what is your responsibility better than you do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Richard Feynman

There were many ways of not burdening one’s conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum. When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.

Richard von Weizscker

There is nothing like a coup de foudre and absorption in family responsibility for maturing the male and pulling his scattered wits together.

Sir V Pritchett

Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Thomas Szasz

I believe that all of us have the capacity for one adventure inside us, but great adventure is facing responsibility day after day.

William Gordon

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

William Reece Smith, Jr.