Responsibility quotes
5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside responsibility — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"In general, we should be able to agree that those who have greater opportunities and face fewer impediments have a greater responsibility to do more to help achieve such ends."
"It also seems beyond controversy that moral responsibilities are greater to the extent that people "have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.""
"A more appropriate expansion is the statement "it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies" a transcript of a talk to a writers conference in Australia in 1996, where I had been asked to talk on "writers and intellectual responsibility" - a question that I said I found "puzzling," because I knew of nothing to say about it beyond truisms, though these were perhaps worth affirming because they are "so commonly denied, if not in words, then in consistent practice.""
"[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned."
"For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect."
"I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together."
"The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants."
"I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society."
"We have the responsibility to put our gifts to work."
"It is man's intrinsic and irreducible self-responsibility to humanize himself, to exercise his entire range of rational and moral resources to raise his mode of being and seeing and acting above not just that of animals, but also above that of the majority of subhuman (never to be self-realized) humans who will never draw themselves into a self-punishing position of focal self-diagnosis and self-accountability."
"The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes."
"Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse."
"You got responsibilities when you’re a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who’re you going to lead?"
"Inevitably in my career of 35 years, I was in one turnaround circumstance after another, and I was personally put in positions of significant responsibility but without complete authority over everyone that needed to be mobilized."
"I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend."
"Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment."
"It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will."
"What my daughter does is my own responsibility, the way she represents herself."
"Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak."
"I just felt like I couldn't deal with the everyday responsibilities of life, paying bills and all of that. I'm terrible at all of that. So I knew I had to make enough money to pay someone else to deal with all of that."
