Responsibility

Responsibility is the state of being "responsible", or answerable for an act performed or for its consequences, especially morally, legally, or politically.

Sourced

• 'Am I responsible or are you', a senior official asked his pilot, dubiously beginning a flight to Baghdad, 'for seeing that this machine is not overloaded?' 'That will have to be decided at the inquest.'
  • James (Jan) Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978), p. 357.

• I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived.
  • Intro to "Gee, Officer Krupke", in West Side Story by Stephen Sondheim

• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
  • George Bernard Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists", Man and Superman (1903)

• With great power there must also come — great responsibility!
  • Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962 (the first Spider-Man story)
  • Variant: "With great power comes great responsibility."
    • Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. "Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48". Lefèvre, 1832
    • possibly used in Isaac Asimov's novella "The Bicentennial Man" (1976)
    • "Uncle" Ben Parker, in Spider-Man (2002)
    • The saying, however, long pre-dates these sources, appearing in print in a number of variants since at least 1817.

• In dreams begin responsibilities.
  • William Butler Yeats, epigram to the book Responsibilities (1914), later used as the title of the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (1937) by Delmore Schwartz.

Unsourced

• Remember, you have been given absolute power to bind and to loose, but the greater the power, the more terrible its responsibility.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

• Life, man is given as something worthy of sacrifice in the way of His love; free will, as exemplary of justice, is the mechanism by which one's choice in that sacrifice must be made.
  • Walter Grant IV

• 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

• There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
  • P.J. O'Rourke

• One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
  • P.J. O'Rourke

• Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, it is impossible to live anymore complacent in the world as it is.
  • Anonymous

• Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.
  • Dalai Lama