Responsibility Quotes - page 100
The Senate general provision also states that savings may result from non-commencement of the P/A/P or the inability of the agency to obligate its released allotment and implement it within the period when the appropriation is valid, whereas the House version qualifies that savings also result from non-commencement of a P/A/P, meaning the inability of the agency to obligate an allotment only within the first semester of the year. In the same manner, the Senate provision demands more fiscal responsibility from agencies by adding the proviso in Sec. 68 that "Programmed appropriations which have not been released or allotments not obligated due to the fault of the agency concerned shall not be considered as savings and shall revert to the General Fund.”.
Francis Escudero
Last year, I filed Senate Bill Number 123 which penalizes bus drivers who commit criminal negligence in road mishaps with 20 years of imprisonment. The existing preventive policies require more teeth to achieve safety benefits. There is no guarantee to prevent all road accidents because of many factors including human, mechanical and environmental. But regulators like the LTO and the LTFRB carry the weight of preventing fatal accidents before these happen by strictly implementing the road safety fundamentals of all public utility vehicles. They have the responsibility to make all public transportation reasonably safe to drive and to travel on. These regulators must do their jobs. Stern measures need to be strictly implemented to ensure road safety. Conscious efforts from all sectors of government and the society should be at high level to avoid further loss of lives and damage to person and property. .
Francis Escudero
I thank the honorable Senate President for entrusting the undersigned with the critical responsibility of managing the Senate's role in fulfilling Congress' duty to oversee the Executive Department's use of public funds and to ensure the allocation of the same is guided by what is in the best interests of our people.
Francis Escudero
We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.
Buckminster Fuller
It requires pragmatic problem-solving from even the most passionate partisans. It relies on compromise between opposing sides to protect the interests we share. We can fight like hell for our ideas to prevail. But we have to respect each other or at least respect the fact that we need each other. That has never been truer than today, when Congress must govern with a president who has no experience of public office, is often poorly informed and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct. We must respect his authority and constitutional responsibilities. We must, where we can, cooperate with him. But we are not his subordinates. We don't answer to him. We answer to the American people. We must be diligent in discharging our responsibility to serve as a check on his power. And we should value our identity as members of Congress more than our partisan affiliation.
John McCain
[T]he daimonic power does not merely take the individual over as its victim, but works through him psychologically, it clouds his judgment, makes it harder for him to see reality, but still leaves him with the responsibility for the act. This is the age old dilemma of my own personal responsibility even though I am ruled by fate. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality are psychologized only to a limited extent. Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time.
Rollo May
If wars in the future are to be prevented the nations must be united in their determination to keep the peace under law.
Nothing is more essential to the future peace of the world than continued cooperation of the nations which had to muster the force necessary to defeat the conspiracy of the Axis powers to dominate the world.
While these great states have a special responsibility to enforce the peace, their responsibility is based upon the obligations resting upon all states, large and small, not to use force in international relations except in the defense of law. The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.
Harry S. Truman
As an openly gay comedian, I feel a responsibility to talk about a lot of issues that-- What? Are you gonna test me? You don't know if I'm lying. I can be as gay as I want to be up here, fuck you. What, are you going to strap me to a chair and blow loads in my face to see if I'm fibbing when I say I love it?
Doug Stanhope
No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. We all share responsibility for each other's security, and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves.
- And, I would add that this responsibility is not simply a matter of States being ready to come to each other's aid when attacked - important though that is. It also includes our shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity - a responsibility solemnly accepted by all nations at last year's UN world summit. That means that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by Governments intent on massacring their own people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when heinous crimes are committed.
Kofi Annan
Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do.
Bob Black
The spectacle of the United States Army routing unarmed citizens with tanks and firebrands outraged many Americans. The Bonus Army episode came to symbolize Hoover's supposed insensitivity to the plight of the unemployed. In fact the worst violence, resulting in two deaths, had come at the hands of the district police, not the federal troops, and the blame for the torching of Anacostia Flats was MacArthur's, not Hoover's. But Hoover chose to ignore MacArthur's insubordination and assumed full responsibility for the army's actions.
Douglas MacArthur
Should we leave this seriously flawed individual in charge of our nation, and in extension, the free world? I think not. Each of us as citizens of this democracy have a duty to listen, learn and act in the best interest of our fellow citizens. That's what we just celebrated on July Fourth. Look at the evidence, decide for yourself, and let our elected officials know how you would direct them to act. If Americans abdicate this responsibility on such a serious matter, perhaps we don't deserve the democracy that so many have given their lives for.
John Danforth
I hold myself that peace cannot be fully assured on the earth until all the nations are not only members of the League, but are inspired in their national policy with the spirit of the Covenant. Unfortunately, at the present time the active membership of the League is by no means complete. We have to take account of the fact that, however much we may wish that a certain state of mind should be universal and a common ideal inspire all nations, it would constitute a lack of frankness to pretend that such a spirit is universal, if, in fact, it is not so. The truth is that the collective system is at present in a state of evolution and until all nations share equally a desire to cooperate in working that system those Governments who believe in it have an obligation, not only towards one another, but towards their own people, to take those elementary precautions which are the responsibility of every Government.
Anthony Eden
We are the dominant power. And that imposes on us a responsibility to be actually concerned with the well being of the world. Because we set the agenda. And there are a lot of problems, including terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, that can only be tackled by collective action. And we ought to be leading that collective action, instead of riding roughshod over other people's opinions and interests.
George Soros
Hayek doesn't seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom). He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek's view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society. Hayek's political philosophy recognizes only negative rights. Positive fulfillment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving.
Friedrich Hayek
When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishments or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility. Share the credit, take the blame, and quietly find out and fix things that went wrong. A psychotherapist who owned a school for severely troubled kids had a rule: "Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it's an excuse and not a reason." This rule works for everybody, but it works especially for leaders.
Colin Powell
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome. ... to my mind, it is of vast importance that our people reach some general understanding of what the complications really are, rather than react from a passion or a prejudice or an emotion of the moment. As I said more formally a moment ago, we are remote from the scene of these troubles. It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.
George C. Marshall
The last place I wanted to return to was the music business. But it's the people and the cause that matter and right now there's an important need, which is bridge-building. I wanted to support the cause of humanity, because that's what I always sang about.
Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again. It's a big step for me but it's a natural step. I don't feel at all irked by the responsibility - I feel inspired.
Cat Stevens
