One does not encourage “responsibility” by forcibly restricting the range of people’s authority over their own lives.
— Butler Shaffer
The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security.
— Robert Welch
The price of greatness is responsibility.
— Winston Churchill
When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.
— George Pataki
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be… if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.
— Thomas Jefferson
Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
— Mark Twain
The individual can never escape the moral burden of his existence. He must choose between obedience to authority and responsibility to himself. Moral decisions are often hard and painful to make. The temptation to delegate this burden to others is therefore ever-present. Yet, as all of history teaches us, those who would take from man his moral burdens–be they priests or warlords, politicians or psychiatrists–must also take from him his liberty and hence his very humanity.
— Thomas S. Szasz
We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.
— Thomas Sowell
