Irresponsibility Quotes
More Irresponsibility Quotes
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
salvador allende— Henry Kissinger (27 June 1970) in a meeting of the US "40 Committee" overseeing covert actions
[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
richard feynman— Part 3: "Feynman, The Bomb, and the Military", "Los Alamos from Below", p. 132
This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
george gissing— Summer, § VII, p. 89
The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts.He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.
herbert read— Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1938)
Courage which goes against military expediency is stupidity , or, if it is insisted upon by a commander, irresponsibility.
erwin rommel— Letter (9 November 1942), Ch. 16 : The Great Retreat, p. 347
Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual’s tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community for example, another country or historical period. … It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.
richard rorty— “Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again.
cat stevens— As quoted in "Yussuf Islam, Formerly Cat Stevens, Expresses Support For Rushdie Death Sentence" in The Christian Science Monitor (1989)
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
john updike— Ch. 6 (Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989))
Having a baby and giving it up for adoption, as pro-life people advocate, is not seen by most pro-choice people as a moral solution to the abortion problem. To transform a fetus into a baby and then send it out into a world where the parents can have no assurance that it will be well-loved and cared for is, for pro-choice people, the height of moral irresponsibility.
— Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984).
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— Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1985
Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds... But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.
laura riding— Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetic Drama", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)
