Trait of the Month for September, 2005 Responsibility

Responsibility Obligates

Responsibility is that human quality that obligates us to react in a positive manner to situations as they arise. It may be widely thought that the actions we take in response to life's experiences depend heavily upon learned behavior assimilated from our culture. Acculturation, while surely inspiring behavior, should never be thought of as the foundation for our actions. In truth we must bear the consequences for our actions because within any culture, we are ultimately responsible for them.

As human beings, we have the ability to choose. In other words, we are not merely creatures who react to situations because of learned stimulus/response scenarios. We have the unique, God-given ability to reflect on various issues that come before us. Rather than just reacting to various stimuli, as do animals, we analyze information, color it with our sense of values, and synthesize relevant data before taking action. Actions that can also be termed "responsible actions" require one additional step. Webster’s Dictionary calls this additional step the "ability to answer for one's conduct and obligations." Within the context of responsible decision-making, then, there is a deliberate consideration given to what is in the best interest of our fellow humans.

From the depths of our free will come responses to situations that are ours alone to make. Although our choices are undeniably shaded by the mores of our culture to which we belong, the choices we make or the actions we take cannot be divorced from our moral perspectives and inextricably flow from our own value system. Responsibility is that quality that is similar in context to the conscience but where the conscience tells us what is right or what is wrong, responsibility calls us to act upon that knowledge. Responsibility is the workhorse of the conscience. It puts wings to our prayers.

Responsibility responds to the conscience of each person by putting aside self-serving activities and doing those things that are in the best interest of his or her friends, family, community, and nation. Only then can the obligation of responsibility be fulfilled.

Dr. Phil Shirley, President
Southeast Arkansas College

Some famous quotes on responsibility:

• Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
  G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962)
• As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.
  A. J. Toynbee
• Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.
  Joan Didion (1934 - ), "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"
• Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
  Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
• Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.
  John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), as given in A. Schlesinger Jr's, "A Thousand Days"
• Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence.
  Elihu Burritt
• How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
  Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
• I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty.
  John D. Rockefeller Jr.
• I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
  Bob Dylan (1941 - )
• If you don't accept responsibility for your own actions, then you are forever chained to a position of defense.
  Holly Lisle, Fire In The Mist, 1992
• In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less.
  John Christian Bovee
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
  George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
• Man has responsibility, not power.
  Tuscarora proverb
• One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.
  Dan Quayle (1947 - ), 12/6/89
• Responsibility by definition means answerable or accountable for. And what is a person responsible for? Everything he thinks, says or does. Why? Because no matter what or whom one can blame for the circumstances of his life, he is still stuck with the consequences of everything he thinks, says or does. People can be terribly unreliable but never irresponsible. Thus there is no way a person can be irresponsible because everyone is answerable or accountable for everything he thinks, say or does, does not do or neglects to do. Until people fully realize that they are totally responsible for their lives, we as a society collectively will be operating under a false and distorted assumption of what responsibility means.
  Sidney Madwed
• Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong.
  Tyron Edwards
• So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.
  John Haldane (1892 - 1964)
• The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
  Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)
• The more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear, toward others as well as ourselves.
  Oscar Arias Sanchez (1941 - )
• The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
  Brooks Atkinson (1894 - 1984),
  Once Around the Sun, 1951
• The price of greatness is responsibility.
  Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
• The process of creating new, democratic organs of government power is beginning, and, as never before, the greatest responsibility rests with the broadcast media.
  Eduard Sagalaev
• To decide, to be at the level of choice, is to take responsibility for your life and to be in control of your life.
  Abbie M. Dale
• To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.
  Alan Paton
• Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backward, lying down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.
  Author Unknown
• 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 (1918 - 1988)
• We've gotten to the point where everybody's got a right and nobody's got a responsibility.
  Newton Minow, chairman of the FCC
• Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them -- this is of the essence of leadership.
  Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960
• You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.
  Stephen W. Comiskey
• You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
  Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
• You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
  Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)

For more familiar quotes on Faith, see Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

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