Irresponsibility Quotes - Page 4

• For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

  Lewis Thomas

  Greed, Nations, Heartlessness

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.

  Irving Kristol

  Optimistic, Cheerful, Doe

  Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1985.

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• The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Religion, Soil, Opinion

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.294, Courier Corporation

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• Casually, unconsciously, but with deadly effectiveness, western man all round the globe destroyed the traditional gods and the ancient societies with his commerce and his science. ... Does it mean nothing to him if great areas of the world, where western influence has been predominant, emerge from this tutelage unable to return to the old life, yet unfitted for the new? It is hard to believe that the future could ever belong to men demonstrating irresponsibility on so vast a scale.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Believe, Mean, Men

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• That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, War, Home

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination.

  Herman Melville

  Book, Rome, Feelings

  Herman Melville (2001). “Tales, Poems, and Other Writings”

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• I think that asserting that former President Obama wasn't born in the United States was just the height of irresponsibility, of course. And Donald Trump corrected that one. There are others that have yet to be corrected.

  Al Gore

  Thinking, President, United States

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think we left out one of the really important elements contributing to the dynamism of society, and that is the right to privacy. I mean something more than the right to shave in private. I mean the right to join what I want to join, to do what I want to do, or not to do what I might do without giving anyone a reason, either in advance or afterwards. That does not mean that I am seeking for irresponsibility socially.

  Chester Barnard

  Mean, Thinking, Rights

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• We must protect each other against the attacks of those self-appointed watchdogs of patriotism now abroad in the land who irresponsibly pin red labels on anyone whom they wish to destroy. ... [Academic professionals are the only person competant to differentiate between honest independents and the Communists.] This is our responsibility. It is not a pleasant task. But if it is left to outsiders, the distinction is not likely to be made and those independent critics of social institutions among us who are one of the glories of a true university could be silenced.

  Joel Henry Hildebrand

  Independent, Responsibility, Self

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• There were two unpleasant surprises [about Washington]. One was the inertia of Congress, the length of time it takes to get a complicated piece of legislation through ... and the other was the irresponsibility of the press.

  Jimmy Carter

  Two, Pieces, Surprise

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• His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.

  Jack London

  Night, Forgotten, Bondage

  Jack London, JACK LONDON (2015). “White Fang (Arcadia Classics)”, p.100, Jack London

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• Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

  Hannah Arendt

  Frustration, Men, Temptation

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• An institution that...would permit Iraq, a terrorist state that refuses to disarm, to become soon the chair of the United Nations Commission on Disarmament, and which recently elected Libya - a terrorist state - to chair the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of all things, seems not to be even struggling to regain credibility. That these acts of irresponsibility could happen now, at this moment in history, is breathtaking.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  War, Struggle, Rights

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