Every guilty person is his own hangman.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it’s a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it’s not! You don’t really take responsibility for your work.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

The Scoutmaster who is a hero to his boys holds a powerful lever to their development but at the same time brings a great responsibility on himself. They are quick enough to see the smallest characteristic about him, whether it be a virtue or a vice.

No other country in the world does what we do. On every issue, the world turns to us, not simply because of the size of our economy or our military might – but because of the ideals we stand for, and the burdens we bear to advance them.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Ultimately this issue is on us. We’re the ones who make the decisions about what our kids eat.

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

It is my responsibility that I must make demonstrative efforts to reach out to every citizen of the country.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

I am not deeply involved in Australian politics but I know there are prime ministers, governments around the world who are not acting responsibly in relation to climate change.

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.

Always do everything you ask of those you command.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

I have often been asked what I think about at the moment of take-off. Of course, no pilot sits and feels his pulse as he flies. He has to be part of the machine. If he thinks of anything but the task in hand, then trouble is probably just around the corner.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

If you’re a quarterback, you want everything on your shoulders. You want to be the one to make the decisions.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

War settles nothing.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

We have to understand what the older generation has dealt to us, what mess they have created that we have to clean up and live with.

People make a big fuss over you when you’re President. But I’m very serious about doing everything I can to make sure that it doesn’t go to my head.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

When the players go home, I can’t tell them what to do, so you need to create an atmosphere of trust. I don’t want to think, ‚What are they doing now? Do I need to call them?‘

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

Politics, according to the Social Doctrine of the Church, is one of the highest forms of charity, because it serves the common good. I cannot wash my hands, eh? We all have to give something!