Burden Of Responsibility Quotes

A man accepts the thankless burden of responsibility. We women do not. To us, life is a game we play one day at a time. ~ Clive Cussler

Always this barrier, this impossibility of getting through. This time he did not waste his time trying; he simply went on stroking her, thinking, It'll be on my conscience, whatever happens to her. And she knows it, too. So she's absolved of the burden of responsibility, and that, for her, is the worst thing possible. Too bad, he thought, I wasn't able to make love to her. ~ Philip K. Dick

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself. ~ Olivia Laing

What was needed, was not merely a resolute man, but a man who was also free from the net of legal controls. Such being the circumstances, Quinctius declared that he would nominate Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus as Dictator, convinced that in him were courage and resolution equal to the majestic authority of that office. The proposal was unanimously approved, but Cincinnatus, hesitating to accept the burden of responsibility, asked what the Senate was thinking of to wish to expose an old man like him to what must prove the sternest of struggles; but hesitation was in vain, for when from every corner of the House came the cry that in that aged heart lay more wisdom - yes, and courage too - than in all the rest put together, and when praises, well deserved, were heaped upon him and the consul refused to budge an inch from his purpose, Cincinnatus gave way and, with a prayer to God to save his old age from bringing loss or dishonor upon his country in her trouble, was named Dictator by the consul. ~ Livy

Going back to the missed-disco opportunities or forgone pleasures argument, this would be entirely valid if we were discussing the reasons I've never had a dog. Whereas it's never even occurred to me to have a child, I would love to have a dog but am put off by the burden of responsibility involved. And while not having a child is a source of pleasure, not having a dog is a source of constant torment and endless anxiety for my wife and me. We keep wishing that we could arrange our lives in such a way that it was possible to have a dog, but we keep coming up empty-handed, empty-pawed. ~ Meghan Daum

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do. ~ David Graeber

How was it this easy? When had Josephine Somerhall's presence become something he required to find...happiness? Since when did he need to be in her company to find the burden of responsibility temporarily banished, the long-forgotten laughter and carefree joy of living reinstated with a single smile? ~ Kelly Bowen

I love getting to be in 'The Avengers.' You just breathe a little bit. It's not all about you. It's so nice to have other people bearing the burden of responsibility. ~ Chris Evans

I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love. ~ Edward VIII

Americans, in foreign policy, are torn to the point of schizophrenia. They are reluctant, than aggressive; asleep at the switch, then quick on the trigger; indifferent, then obsessed, then indifferent again. They act out of a sense of responsibility and then resent and fear the burden of responsibility they have taken on themselves. Their effect on the world, not surprisingly, is often the opposite of what they intend. Americans say they want stability in the international system, but they are often the greates disrupters of stability. They extol the virtues of international laws and institutions but then violate and ignore them with barley a second thought. They are recolutionary power but think they are a status quo power. They want to be left alone but can't seem to leave anyone else alone. They are continually surprising the world with their behavior, but not nearly as much as they are continually surprising themselves. ~ Robert Kagan

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin . We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation. ~ Eric Hoffer

Peace comes not because your prayer has been answered exactly as you prayed it, but because you shifted your focus and the burden of responsibility on to Him. ~ Christopher Parkening

If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born. ~ Jonas Salk

His strides are the only evidence he exists, and so he wanders,
lost in a city that he has always called home.

Our creased hides and limp tongues attract neither fashionable
eye nor futile envy, and we no longer feel the burden of his
entire weight, though his heart is heavier than it was.
Sometimes we stop, and he looks with longing at the stars
overhead.

We remain on the ground. We have no concept of up, for out
reality lies below. It is how life works. This too shall pass. ~ Krishna Udayasankar

Middle grade fiction shapes the lives of future adults. It is one of the most powerful forces in literature. Those who use their intellect to create works of fiction for the middle grade audience do so with an incredible privilege and responsibility as authors. For that reason, we are glad to post our reviews of their great efforts here on Goodreads. ~ Edward Gordon

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes. ~ J.M. Coetzee

I've been a Republican since age 13, when we got our first television set, and I saw the Republican National Convention on television. And President Eisenhower was talking about personal responsibility, about opening the door for opportunity and that people could really take care of themselves without a lot of government intrusions. ~ Lionel Sosa

It is the foremost responsibility of the United States, having been the predominant nuclear power, to take the lead in scaling this back and making good on its signed and sealed and ratified obligation in Article 6 of the non-proliferation treaty going back to '68 to eliminate this nuclear arsenal. That's a serious international obligation. ~ George Lee Butler

Life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild ~ Oscar Wilde

The rich are like beasts of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at the night of death unladen; they carry to their grave only the bruises and marks of their toil. ~ Saint Augustine

Even if you have a lot of work to do, if you think of it as wonderful, and if you feel it as wonderful, it will transform into the energy of joy and fire, instead of becoming a burden. ~ Tulku Thondup Rinpoche

Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Inaugural Adress, January 20, 1961 ~ John F. Kennedy

The moment you discover in life that it's not about yourself, that it is about investing in others, I think you're entering a steadier state to be a great leader. Because above all, I think the main quality of a leader is to be a human being. There's no reason you are special because you happen to have this job or these responsibilities. ~ Paul Polman

What is happening in Iraq now is awful, but it is a consequence of our invasion, not our withdrawal.The blame for what's happening right now is squarely at Maliki's feet. This is not a responsibility of the United States. ~ Chris Murphy

When you carry your burden, you should know that it is good for you to have it. Make the best of this burden and take from it everything which is necessary for your intellectual life, as your stomach takes from food everything necessary for your flesh, or as fire burns brighter after you put some wood on it. - MARCUS AURELIUS ~ Leo Tolstoy

Men must stop being jealous of their power and generously allow freedom and responsibility to others. The reward is harmonious families and society. ~ Delphine De Girardin

We also need to encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible themselves. We can do this by redesigning our tax system into an expenditure tax with a single flat rate ... We have to substantially reduce the size and scope of the federal government, fundamentally increase the role of the states in choosing their own practices, and bring decision-making closer to the people, not to unelected administrators. These steps are crucial to getting our nation on a path of fiscal, political and constitutional responsibility. ~ Edwin Feulner

Your greatest responsibility in your life is to be the best version of yourself. When you feel for what the soul believes that is who you become. ~ Shannon L. Alder

What could be better for slave owners than slaves who think they're free? This is the greatest trick ever pulled: a nation of slaves who think they're free. Slaves must be fed, housed, even clothed. But if they must feed, house, and clothe themselves as 'payment' for their work, this removes burden from the slave owner - while the same work is performed and accomplished, to the benefit of the slave owner. The best part is that slaves who think they're free will never work to end their slavery. They will look down on those who do not work. To work to end their slavery, they must first learn they are slaves. This is the hardest task of all: to free their minds. ~ Robert Peate

There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive). ~ Antonin Scalia

In two of your poems you called that central
Passage of womanhood a wound,
Instead of a curtain guarding a silken
Trail of sighs. How many men,
Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly
Touching it, recklessly needing
To enter its warmth again and again,
Have assumed it embodies their own ache
Of absence, the personal
Gash that has punished their lives.
So endowed of anatomy, any woman
Who has been loved
Knows that her tenderest blush
Of tissue is a luxe burden of have.
Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,
To prepare yet another nesting for love.
It is not a wound, friend.
It is a home for you.
It is a way into the world. ~ Michele Wolf

History speaks pretty clearly that the markets do better with Democrats. Republicans' ideas of what constitutes fiscal responsibility simply are not good for the stock market. Democrats have many tendencies, but one of them is to look after the workers, and actually that tends to be good for demand and good for markets. ~ Jeremy Grantham

You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility. ~ Ben Horowitz

Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world. ~ Ann Clwyd

I've learned something: What many of us cal destiny is really our own instinct. We know what is right, but we don't
want to admit it, especially if what is right will lead to our own death. We call it destiny so we don't have to accept responsibility for making those decisions. Human instinct is stronger than anyone will admit. ~ Carrie Vaughn

But it's not your fault. You can't control what other people do.

No, but I was responsible for my own actions. At some point we had abandoned responsibility and began fostering corruption in others so that we might shield ourselves from persecution by virtue of a common guilt. We did this in the name of profit, and we justified our crimes with the rationalization that, somewhere down the line, better people would safeguard our victims from us. I wasn't a looter or a moocher. I wasn't a producer either. None of us were. We certainly weren't capitalists. We were pillagers. Decency exists. That alone must make it important; even the great Darwin himself would say that. But we tried to cut decency out of others so as to lower the bar for ourselves.

We are relative creatures. The man who teaches his slaves to read is a saint in a world where slavery is legal, and a monster where it isn't. We aren't born knowing if we're good or bad. We decide by comparing ourselves to others - and by that yardstick it's no different to measure by our own successes than our neighbors failures, save that it's easier to corrupt the neighbor. ~ Nicholas Lamar Soutter

We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening. ~ Nevil Shute

Thanks to the leadership of Vice President Gore, we have a government for the Information Age, once again a government that is a progressive instrument of the common good, rooted in our oldest values of opportunity, responsibility and community, devoted to fiscal responsibility, determined to give our people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives in the 21st century, a 21st century government for 21st century America. ~ William J. Clinton

It is only people with a sense of personal responsibility who can help others. It is only people with a sense of personal responsibility who can be helped in a lasting way. ~ Eric Sevareid

Forget about the money for a moment. Lose yourself in the wilderness, listen to the music of the softly blowing winds, feel the rain on your bare skin, let the mountains take the burden off your shoulders. ~ Kiran Bisht

Glistening liquid pooled in two spots. Matthew was trying to clean it up, but his hands were shaking, his jaw working. I grabbed some towels from the linen closet and knelt beside him.
"I have this," I whispered.
Matthew sat back, lifting his head and closing his eyes. He let out a staggered breath. "This should've never happened."
Tear built in my eyes as I sopped up what was left of Adam. "I know."
They are all like my children. Now I've lost another, and for what? It doesn't make sense." His shoulders shook. "It never makes sense."
"I'm sorry." Wetness gathered on my cheeks, and I wiped at my face with my shoulder. "His is my fault. He was trying to protect me."
…. "It's not just your fault Katy. This was a world you stumbled into, one filled with treachery and greed. You weren't prepared for it. Neither are any of them."
I lifted my head, blinking back tears. "I trusted Blake when I should've trusted Daemon. I let this happen."
Matthew twisted toward me, grasping my cheeks. "You cannot take on the full responsibility for this. You didn't make the choices Blake did. You didn't force his hand."
I choked on a broken sob as grief tore through me. His words didn't ease the guilt, and he knew it. Then the strangest thing happened. He pulled me into his arms, and I broke. Sobs raked my entire body. I pressed my head against his shoulder, my body shaking his, or maybe he was crying for his loss, too. Time passed, and it became New Yea ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence. ~ Price Pritchett

Some worry endlessly over missions that were missed, or marriages that did not turn out, or babies that did not arrive, or children that seem lost, or dreams unfulfilled, or because age limits what they can do. I do not think it pleases the Lord when we worry because we think we never do enough or that what we do is never good enough ... Some needlessly carry a heavy burden of guilt which could be removed through confession and repentance. ~ Boyd K. Packer

We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn't do this. We mustn't play Hot Potato with our pain. Let's absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let's inhale it, let's digest it, let's process it into fuel. ~ Miriam Toews

I'm thankful for the ability to share my faith in a lot of different places. It's something that I take as a responsibility and an obligation to handle as best as I can. ~ Tim Tebow

Because you do not happen to be married does not make you essentially different from others. All of us are very much alike in appearance and emotional responses, in our capacity to think, to reason, to be miserable, to be happy, to love and be loved.

You are just as important as any others in the scheme of our Father in Heaven, and under His mercy no blessing to which you otherwise might be entitled will forever be withheld from you. . . .

I do not worry about you young men who have recently returned from the mission field. You know as well as I what you ought to do. It is your responsibility and opportunity, under the natural process of dating and courting, to find a wonderful companion and marry in the house of the Lord. Don't rush it unduly and don't delay it unduly. "Marry in haste and repent at leisure" is an old proverb that still has meaning in our time. But do not dally along in a fruitless, frustrating, and frivolous dating game that only raises hopes and brings disappointment and in some cases heartache.

Yours is the initiative in this matter. Act on it in the spirit that ought to prompt every honorable man who holds the priesthood of God. Live worthy of the companionship of a wonderful partner. Put aside any thought of selfish superiority and recognize and follow the teaching of the Church that the husband and wife walk side by side with neither one ahead nor behind.

Happy marriage is based on a foundation of equal yoking ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. ~ Abraham Lincoln

To attempt to commit the Church to social and political programs may be a short cut . to escape from the more difficult and costly responsibility of submitting ourselves to those deeper changes of disposition and outlook which are in the end a much more powerful revolutionary force. ~ J. H. Oldham

Is commonplace today to find large groups of people who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of all the basic necessities of its citizens. Benjamin Franklin, however, wrote: To relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; it is godlike; but, if we provide encouragement for laziness, and supports for folly, may we not be found fighting against the order of God and nature, which perhaps has appointed want and misery as the proper punishments for, and cautions against, as well as necessary consequences of, idleness and extravagance? Whenever we attempt to amend the scheme of Providence, and to interfere with the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect, lest we do more harm than good.3 ~ Ben Carson

I felt a strange sense of calm and realized what I was feeling was the release of responsibility. Nobody expected me to be at work the next day. Nobody was trying to call me. I had no e-mail to check. Ghost enthusiasts weren't stalking me on Facebook. Our responsibilities were stripped down to the bare biological basics: thirst, hunger, cold. All at once I could see why lifelong convicts got to where they couldn't function outside of prison walls. You're almost functioning more at a level for which the human brain was intended. ~ David Wong

I'm convinced that our duty to provide advice and consent for justices of the Supreme Court is our most important constitutional responsibility. ~ Frank Lautenberg

Since free men cannot judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure. ~ Walter Karp

He had felt viable being near her or knowing she was listening to him or having the comfort of their casual meeting within a dream. With her, he simply and effortlessly felt better. They all felt better, unburdened, cared for, and heard. Being connected to her eased his suffering as he gave her his. It was only when she began to drown in the cumulation of commingled torments that to save whatever part of her was left, she disconnected, and when she did, his suffering returned and remained with him longer than she had. But instead of saving herself, it was the additional burden of her own anguish from letting them all go that took her breath and inevitably pulled her under. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
[On Water] ~ Guy De Maupassant

Whenever government assumed responsibility for the security, welfare, and prosperity of citizens, the costs of government rise beyond the point where it is politically expedient to cover them by direct tax levies. ~ Leonard Read

Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state. ~ Will Durant

The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth. ~ Emma Goldman

Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood. ~ Sylvia Ann Hewlett