Irresponsibility Quotes - Page 2

• The driving force behind the liberal counter-offensive in Europe has been a reaction against irresponsibility.

  Jacques Delors

  Europe, Driving, Offensive

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• A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Thinking, Kind

  Wendell Berry (2009). “A Place on Earth”, p.180, Counterpoint

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• In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.

  Anthony Zinni

  War, Lying, Iraq

  "Battle Ready (Commander Series)". Book by Anthony Zinni, Tom Clancy and Tony Koltz, www.nbcnews.com. 2004.

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• The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Suicide, Men, Fascination

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• He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence

  Jack Kerouac

  Fate, Psychosis, Violence

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

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• Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work.

  Frederick Herzberg

  Healthy, Indifference, Absurd

  "Punished by Rewards: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes". Book by Alfie Kohn, p. 205, 1999.

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• On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Atheist, Real

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.

  Paulo Freire

  Discipline, Tolerance, Democracy

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• Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.

  Winkie Pratney

  Loss, Animal, Race

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• The artist's duty to himself is a combination of immense responsibility and immense irresponsibility. I think those two interlock.

  David Cronenberg

  Responsibility, Artist, Thinking

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• Many guys see relationships with women as a zero-sum game: If she wins, he loses. Marriage is the ultimate contest: Her job is to get him to capitulate to marriage. So many men see marriage as the "end of freedom," the end of boyhood. That's why bachelor parties are supposed to revel in that boyish irresponsibility "one last time." So many guys figure, "Why rush into something that means basically that you'll be a prisoner forever?"

  Michael Kimmel

  Zero, Jobs, Party

  "How hookups and hang-ups delay manhood". TODAYshow.com Q&A, www.today.com. August 26, 2008.

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• Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.

  Charles Derber

  Responsibility, Government, Greed

  Charles Derber (2015). “Sociopathic Society: A People's Sociology of the United States”, p.107, Routledge

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• Liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.

  E. J. Dionne

  Hard Work, Generosity, Important

  E.J. Dionne (2013). “Why Americans Hate Politics”, p.554, Simon and Schuster

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• [T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Men, Voting, Principles

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• Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.

  Helen Lynd

  Expression, Desire, Sentimental

  Helen Merrell Lynd (2013). “On Shame And The Search For Identity”, p.203, Routledge

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• An old man, having retired from active life, regains the gaity and irresponsibility of childhood. He is ready to play, he cannot run with his son, but he can totter with his grandson. Our first and last steps have the same rhythm.

  Andre Maurois

  Running, Son, Men

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• The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

  Harry Browne

  Government, Liberty, Libertarian

  "Liberty A to Z". Book by Harry Browne (p. 76), 2004.

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• In the legislature, the House of Representatives is chosen by less than half the people, and not at all in proportion to those who do choose. The Senate are still more disproportionate, and for long terms of irresponsibility. In the Executive, the Governor is entirely independent of the choice of the people, and of their control; his Council equally so, and at best but a fifth wheel to a wagon. In the Judiciary, the judges of the highest courts are dependent on none but themselves.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Independent, Long, People

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way”, p.23, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

  George Gissing

  War, Writing, Mean

  "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft". Book by George Gissing. Summer, § VII, p. 89, 1903.

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• The technological overflow from scientific research has brought scientific research this bad name about carrying an irresponsibility and an alienation from God - because scientific research has led to things like the atom bomb, it's led to problems with depletion of ozone in the Earth's atmosphere, or at least it's revealed those problems.

  George Coyne

  Ozone, Names, Atmosphere

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The frontier in space, embodied in the space colony, is one in which the interactions between humans and their environment is so much more sensitive and interactive and less tolerant of irresponsibility than it is on the whole surface of the Earth. We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies.

  Rusty Schweickart

  Future, Space, Earth

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• In the mighty and almost limitless potential of American industry-the brilliance and rugged determination of its leaders; the skill, energy and patriotism of its workers-there has been welded an almost impregnable defense against the evil designs of any who would threaten the security of the American continent. It is indeed the most forceful and convincing argument yet evolved to restrain the irresponsibility of those who would recklessly bring down upon the good and peace-loving peoples of all the nations of the earth the disaster of total war.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Determination, War, Skills

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• There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

  Tony Kushner

  Fundamentals, Kind, Playwriting

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• Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

  Angela Carter

  Life, Art, Mean

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• Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

  Dorothy Parker

  People, Twenties, Forget

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