Human Responsibility Quotes

Our human responsibility for animal rights, plant rights, and the rights of the earth to its health and wholeness is self-evident. Whatever our beliefs about the hereafter we are the temporary custodians of the here-and-now, and if we neglect our obligations or abuse our powers then we abrogate any rights to a further share in this planet's delights. ~ Densey Clyne

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy. ~ Ken MacLeod

There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility. ~ Jaron Lanier

Quality of life is here considered to be something incompatible with artificial, material standards above that necessary for the satisfaction of fundamental needs, and secondly, that ecological considerations are to be regarded as preconditions for life quality, therefore not outside human responsibility…The lifestyle of the majority should be changed so that the material standard of living in the Western countries becomes universalisable within this century. A consumption over and above that which everyone can attain within the foreseeable future cannot be justified. ~ Arne Næss

He has seen and felt how solemn a thing it was to approach the gate of death, to enter the presence of God; and from that awful point of vision, he has contemplated the world, and life, and human responsibility, as they are; and he has come back like a spirit from another sphere, clothed with all the solemnities of eternity; to live now as one soon in reality to be there. ~ Octavius Winslow

If Pelagius had solved the problem of sin and human responsibility by arguing that humans are perfectly capable of doing whatever they want, Augustine solved it by saying that humans deliberately act against the good ideals that they don't know and are selfish, greedy, lustful, stubborn, and proud. In his words, people are non posse non peccare, "not able not to sin," because even the good things that we do are not out of love for God but for some lesser purpose. ~ Justin S. Holcomb

Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect; the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience. The Bible gives us a theology which is more human than Calvinism and more divine than Arminianism, and more Christian than either of them. ~ Philip Schaff

Our view of nature will influence the way we treat nature, and our view of human nature will affect our understanding of human responsibility. ~ Ian Barbour

Some may object that to speak of election or predestination is to limit the kingdom of God to a few. Does it make God a capricious tyrant? We must answer that such objections usually stem from a refusal to accept that we are faced here with a mystery that is not given to us to solve. There is also a radical misunderstanding which maintains that God's sovereignty in election removes man's responsibility. Such is not true. How divine sovereignty and human responsibility work together we cannot know. The Bible makes it clear that they do. // Let us remember that Jesus discriminated and limited the numbers of the saved: 'Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it' (Matthew 7:13-14). This is in line with the Old Testament teaching that only a faithful remnant of Israel would be saved. ~ Graeme Goldsworthy

I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human. ~ Donald Miller

God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility. ~ D. A. Carson

I have made a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human. ~ George W. Bush

The experience I'm talking about has given me one certainty: the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed will be unavoidable. ~ Vaclav Havel

Further, this human responsibility is in the first instance 'not...a task but a gift,...not law but grace'. It expresses itself in 'believing, responsive love' (p.98). So then, 'one who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man. Responsibility is not an attribute, it is the "substance" of human existence. It contains everything..., [it is] that which distinguishes man from all other creatures....' (p.50). Therefore 'if responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears' (p.258). ~ John R.W. Stott

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility. ~ Rollo May

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

The main difficulty encountered is to define the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. Many have summarily disposed of the difficulty by denying its existence. A certain class of theologians, in their anxiety to maintain man's responsibility, have magnified it beyond all due proportions, until God's sovereignty has been lost sight of, and in not a few instances flatly denied. Others have acknowledged that the Scriptures present both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man, but affirm that in our present finite condition and with our limited knowledge it is impossible to reconcile the two truths, though it is the bounden duty of the believer to receive both. The present writer believes that it has been too readily assumed that the Scriptures themselves do not reveal the several points which show the conciliation of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. While perhaps the Word of God does not clear up all the mystery (and this is said with reserve), it does throw much light upon the problem, and it seems to us more honoring to God and His Word to prayerfully search the Scriptures for the complete solution of the difficulty, and even though others have thus far searched in vain, that ought only to drive us more and more to our knees. ~ Arthur W. Pink

Analysis, when seen as limited and never final, helps force the
question of human responsibility, human judgment, and the suffering that
accompanies the assumption of the burden they impose. It is our willingness to assume this burden of suffering that is the only salvation we have,
in the end, against evil. ~ O.C. McSwite

But innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man's role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility. ~ Peter Drucker

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. ~ Vaclav Havel

I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect. ~ Jane Goodall

Every harm done to the society, is harm done to me - every injustice done to the society, is injustice done to me. Such should be the thinking of a responsible and civilized individual of the human society. ~ Abhijit Naskar

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change. ~ Christina Baldwin

When you buy a used car, you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself an expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this with something as unimportant as an automobile. But on the issues of the transcendent, of ethics, of morals, of the origins of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny? ~ Carl Sagan

The human race is already social, and the smartphone has everything needed to enable them to act on their social needs. ~ Keith Teare

Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings. ~ Richard Feynman

The Catholic Church [with Pope John Paul II] has lost its shepherd. The world has lost a champion of human freedom. ~ Chris Matthews

For those who can, one of the things to do is not to move. To stay put. That doesn't mean don't travel; it means have a place and get involved in what can be done in that place. That's the only way we're going to have a representative democracy in America. Nobody stays anywhere long enough to take responsibility for a local community. ~ Gary Snyder

Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live. ~ John Berger

Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and the choices one will have to make are a burden, too heavy for most to know before their time comes. ~ Alice Hoffman

It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans. ~ John Brunner

Consumption.

And if the culture doesn't have a vision for the human person, it certainly doesn't have a vision for the family. In fact, the culture would prefer that every family be broken, because a broken family needs two dishwashers, two lawnmowers, ant two of almost everything else. And if culture could break families up two, three, four ways, it would prefer that. ~ Matthew Kelly

Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life. ~ Orrin Hatch

You cannot divide minds into sexes. Each human being presents an individual problem. ~ Patricia Wentworth

Yes, babies in the womb are human beings, but so what? ~ MaryElizabeth Williams

He who has been impoverished for a long timewho has long stood before the door of the mighty in darkness and begged for alms,has filled his heart with bitterness so that it resembles a sponge full of gall; he knows about the injustice and folly of all human action and sometimes his lips tremble with rage and a stifled scream. ~ Stefan Zweig

For him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class - all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class - she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Human existence and action are characterized by their capacity for meaning.28 No form of human life can be defined "without reference to meaning. It makes sense [Sinn] to understand meaning [Sinn] as the fundamental category of
human existence."29 ~ Udo Schnelle

All popular political doctrines charge your brain with various liberal ideas, such as respect for human rights and freedom, toleration, gender equality and so and so forth. However, in the political arena, a candidate with a charismatic personality in the eyes of the masses, has a great advantage over his opponents in political competition. If you want to become a likely winner, cultivate your charisma, make people believe in you and share your opinion, with no regard to what it is. Your victory depends more on your charisma than on the ideas that you follow. ~ Elmar Hussein

To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life. ~ Susan T. Fiske

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human. ~ Frederick Buechner

I think the (brawl) made the league and the players more conscious of our responsibility to the public. ~ Joe Dumars

We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ. ~ Jean Baudrillard

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into infinite richness of human sense and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of programmed games. ~ Ralph Nader

Heath [Ledger] was always somebody who I admired.He was way beyond his years as a human, in a way. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal

But writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior. ~ John Irving

Bad things happen - wars, plagues, parents abandoning their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts - and no one, not a human or a god, will intervene. ~ Yiyun Li

I begin with movement ... I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement ... ~ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Albert liked to play the stoic, and he embraced the opportunity to do over the negotiations about the marriage. He insisted that Uncle Leopold know what a great sacrifice he was making for the Saxe-Coburg family and Germany. As he gloomily lectured his uncle, 'troubles are inseparable from all human positions and…therefore if one must be subject to plagues and annoyances, it is better to be so for some great or worthy object than for trifles or miseries.'

Unfortunately for Albert, Leopold was deaf to self-pitying emotional blackmail and remained determined on his course. ~ Kate Williams

Call it dating if you like, but I didn't want her to be under the impression that it was anything serious. Not at that point in any case, it was more to be an experiment in human social relationships, one which might or might not lead to sex and or marriage. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable ~ Harry Truman

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will. ~ David Hanson

The vast majority of people make complaining seem to be a basic human need. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven. ~ Christopher Buehlman

But I am not a failure as a human being or as a woman. In some core place deep within, I know this. I fail, yes. But I am not a failure. I disappoint. But I am not a disappointment. Yet when I find myself again in this place - losing the battle for my beauty, my body, my heart - I can sure feel like a failure in every way. ~ Stasi Eldredge

I am against the war, but I do support our white troops. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a member of the party of inclusion. Wonderful, tolerant, rational human beings they are ... ~ David Cross

Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. ~ Joseph Campbell