This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I feel the responsibility of the occasion. Responsibility is proportionate to opportunity." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how"." -
"A garden is the most direct way to recapture the issue of health, and to make it a private instead of a government responsibility." - Wendell Berry
"Responsibility educates, and politics is but another name for God’s way of teaching the masses ethics, under the responsibility of great present interests." - Wendell Phillips
"Responsibility educates." - Wendell Phillips
"In dreams begins responsibility." - William Butler Yeats
"For the educator, complacent in his ivory tower, to scorn affiliation with a cause he considers to be noble, to refuse to attempt to win disciples from the ranks of students he is in a position to influence, is unmistakably to forswear a democratic responsibility, and to earn for himself the contemptible title of dilettante and solipsist." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
"A bulky staff implies a division of responsibility, slowness of action, and indecision; whereas a small staff implies activity and concentration of purpose." - William Tecumseh Sherman
"Accept the responsibility for making yourself happy independent of good or bad fortune, you will be determined to work on your thought patterns instead of chasing illusions." - Zelig Pliskin
"Frequently people say, “He made me angry.” This is inaccurate. No one can make you angry. You make yourself angry by what you tell yourself about a given situation. When you say, “I made myself angry because of what I told myself about this person’s behavior,” you are accepting the responsibility upon yourself, which is the first step leading to improvement." - Zelig Pliskin
"When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. He must know first why he is doing it and then he must proceed with his actions with no doubts or remorse." - Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda
"Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own. " - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
"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, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion. " - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence
"The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. " - Denis E. Waitley
"Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings." - Doug Larson
"Man becomes virtually an automaton in the loss of his individuality and responsibility. He is the harp of a thousand strings played upon by a divine hand, but not a man!" - John Grier Hibben
"Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence." - Elihu Burritt
"Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibilty would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"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 Erickson
"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, fully Friedrich "Fritz" (Frederick) Salomon Perls
"Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there." - Gary Snyder
"When you assume responsibility for what you experience and share what you experience in a spirit of companionship,that is the same as forgiveness. When you hold someone responsible for what you experience, you lose power." - Gary Zukav
"Anarchy is everywhere when responsibility is nowhere to be found." - Gustave Le Bon
"To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man. " - Harold Lewis, fully Harold "Hal" Warren Lewis
"Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power." - Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
"I think [the Enneagram] is here because we need it, on a global basis, to take more responsibility for our thoughts and emotions and to consider, deeply, how to stand in someone else's shoes, and see the decision or the event from very different sets of eyes and see the validity of it." - Helen Palmer
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself." - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
"If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it." - Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible." - Hyman George Rickover
"As an individual, it is your responsibility to bring about a tremendous change in the world. It is your responsibility because you are part of this society, because you are part of this tremendous sorrow of man, this constant effort, struggle, pain, and anxiety. You are responsible. Unless you realize that immense responsibility and come directly in contact with that responsibility and listen to the whole structure, the machinery of that responsibility, do what you will - go to every temple, to every guru, to every Master, to every religious book in the world - your action has no meaning whatsoever because those are mere escapes from actuality." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Life is now and the desire takes you away, farther and farther away from now. And when we see that our life is misery we go on throwing the responsibility on others, and nobody is responsible except us." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"Responsibilities are given to him on whom trust rests. Responsibility is always a sign of trust. " - J. C. Penney, formally James Cash Penney
"It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant - birth, struggle, and death are constant - and so is love, though we may not always think so - and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths - change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not - safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, but which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope - the entire possibility - of freedom disappears. " - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"This evolution towards a real responsibility for others is sometimes blocked by fear. It is easier to stay on the level of a pleasant way of life in which we keep our freedom and our distance. But that means that we stop growing and shut ourselves up in our own small concerns and pleasures." - Jean Vanier
"Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment. Within our country, ultimate decisions are made through democratic means, which tend to moderate radical or ill-advised proposals. Constrained and inspired by historic constitutional principles, our nation has endeavored for more than two hundred years to follow the now almost universal ideals of freedom, human rights, and justice for all." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
"We have been reminded that cruel and inhuman acts can be derived from distorted theological beliefs, as suicide bombers take the lives of innocent human beings, draped falsely in the cloak of God's will. With horrible brutality, neighbors have massacred neighbors in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions. Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God's mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant landmines and, days or years later, a stranger to us — often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs." - Joan Didion
"When you delegate a task to your people, make a point to help them capture your vision for what the completed task will look like. Hold your people accountable to a measurable standard of excellence, and make rewards and consequences a part of enforcing the standard. Give your people full responsibility (ownership) for the completion of specific tasks and the prospect of sharing in the rewards that result." - John C. Maxwell
"The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up." - John C. Maxwell
"Piety cannot consist of specific acts only, such as prayer or ritual observances, but is bound up with all actions, concomitant with all doings, accompanying and shaping all life’s business. Man’s responsibility to God is the scaffold on which he stands as daily he goes on building life. His every deed, every incident of mind, takes place on this scaffold, so that unremittingly man is at work either building up or tearing down his life, his home, his hope of God." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same thing as rebirth; it is transformation, creation… Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors." - Jonas Salk
"We imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook - if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for being available to what is trying to bubble up today. " - Julia Cameron
"The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it." - Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter