Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.
—Gary Snyder
Activism is my rent for living on this planet.
—Alice Walker
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
—Malcolm X
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
—Richard Feynman
Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?
—Sue Monk Kidd
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
—W. H. Auden
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
—Will Rogers
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
—Tom Robbins
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
—George Bernard Shaw
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
—Stanislaus Jerzy Lee
I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.
—Oscar Levant
An enormous conflict between words and deeds is prevalent today: everyone talks about freedom, democracy, justice, human rights, about peace and saving the world from nuclear apocalypse; and at the same time, everyone, more or less, consciously or unconsciously, serves those values and ideals only to the extent necessary to serve himself and his "worldly" interests, personal interests, group interests, power interests, property interests, and state or great-power interests. . . . So the power structures apparently have no other choice than to sink deeper into this vicious maelstrom, and contemporary people apparently have no other choice than to wait around until the final inhibition drops away. But who should begin? Who should break this vicious circle? Responsibility cannot be preached but only borne, and the only possible place to begin is with oneself.
—Vaclav Havel
You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
—Vaclav Havel
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
—Joan Didion
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
—Brooks Atkinson