This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Responsibility prevents crimes." - Edmund Burke
"Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"It is to escape responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings." - Eric Hoffer
"In the present state of medical knowledge a pronouncement of the sentence of "Incurable" on a patient places a serious responsibility on the physician and implies a greater knowledge than he possesses." - Ernst P. Boas
"Responsibility is the thing people dread the most of all. Yet it is one thing in the world that develops us." - Frank Crane
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." - George Bernard Shaw
"If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty." - George F. Kennan
"What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?" - Harriet Martineau
"God has given man a thrilling responsibility for this world. But man has not fulfilled his assignment. God has placed the tiller of history in man’s hand, but man has gone to his hammock and let the winds and tides sweep his ship along." - Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
"People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"The emotion, the ecstasy of love, we all want, but God spare us the responsibility." - Jessamyn West, fully Mary Jessamyn West
"Forgiveness is one of the least understood of all spiritual practices. It has nothing to do with condoning poor behavior in ourselves and others. Rather, it calls us to responsibility. In forgiving ourselves, we make the journey from guilt for what we have done (or not done) to celebration of what we become." - Joan Borysenko
"Character: the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self-respect springs." - Joan Didion
"Responsibility is to oneself; and the highest form of it is irresponsibility to oneself which is to say the calm acceptance of whatever responsibility to other and things comes a-long." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"The culture of organization runs strongly to the shifting of problems to others – to an escape from personal mental effort and responsibility. This, in turns, becomes the larger public attitude. It is for others to do the worrying, take the action. In the world of the great organization, problems are not solved but passed on. And there is a further effect. The delegation process just cited adds ineluctably to the layers of command and to the prestige associated with command. That prestige is regularly measured by the number of individual subordinates." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"By observing a supposed objective truth out there, we become passive victims relieved of responsibility. Instead, we can use our eyes in active vision, to see with, not through. Rather than compounding our neighbor’s error through intellectual condemnation of him, we can enter actively into that relationship through our heart. Freeing him from error in our mind’s eye, we open him to deliverance in his own. There is only one heart, and it can take on any form." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Ethical subjectivism absolves people of ever having to deliberate before making a moral judgment, whereas cultural relativism absolves people from moral responsibility so long as they follow the crowd. At the same time, almost everyone wants others to treat them with respect and be held morally culpable for their hurtful actions." - Judith A. Boss
"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity." - Kahlil Gibran
"The great developer is responsibility." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"As soon as we think with integrity we will realize that we are all properly stewards and that we cannot with integrity deny our responsibility for stewardship of every part of the whole." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"By attempting to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we are giving away our power to some other individual or organization. In this way, millions daily attempt to escape from freedom." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Most of us believe that the freedom and power of adulthood is our due, but we have little taste for adult responsibility and self-discipline." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so we must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Discipline is the tool required to solve life's problems. What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems directly? Delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, dedication to truth, and balance." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful." - Marie Curie, fully Marie Skłodowska-Curie, originally Manya Sklodowska
"Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding." - Martin Buber
"Each of us has a responsibility for being alive: one responsibility to creation, of which we are a part, another to the creator - a debt we repay by trying to extend our areas of comprehension." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"Each of us should realize and should exhibit through our actions the following truth: Moral influence and ethical responsibility are more important and more forceful and more important and more forceful and more lasting than mere power. We are here to be moral forces in the universe, in the world of nations, in our communities and in our families." - Menachem Begin
"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
"Yes, there are powerful systemic forces that can make it difficult for us to do the right thing. In the last analysis, however, ethics is our individual responsibility." - Michael S. Josephson
"Freedom without responsibility is destructive, unity without individual initiative stifling, and equality that does not recognize differences is demoralizing." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity." - Nadine Gordimer
"It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political station. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility. He sacrifices not only his own interest but that of his neighbor, and he betrays the interest of his country." - Noah Webster, fully Noah Webster, Jr.
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might be best measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what’s also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one’s own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might best be measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what's also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one's own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"It is a fusion of two hearts - the union of two lives - the coming together of two tributaries, which after being joined in marriage, will flow in the same channel in the same direction… carrying the same burdens of responsibility and obligation." - Peter Marshall
"Virtue is free, and as a man honors and dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser." - Plato NULL
"Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a an honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility of the chooser." - Plato NULL
"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia." - Ronald S. Miller
"Free will was granted to humanity. Man became conscious of good and evil, and his power of free choice. He acquired simultaneously Freedom and Responsibility. Henceforth he could help or he could hinder." - Oliver Lodge, fully Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge
"With knowledge comes responsibility." - Sogyal Rinpoche
"Power always brings with it responsibility. You cannot have power to work well without having so much power as to be the able to work ill." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt