Thought for Today

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."

~~~~~ Max Stirner

Thought for Today

"The capacity of man himself is only revealed when, under stress and responsibility, he breaks through his educational shell, and he may then be a splendid surprise to himself no less than to this teachers."

~~~~~ Dr. Harvey Cushing

Thought for Today

"I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

~~~~~ Robert A. Heinlein

Thought for Today

"What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?"

~~~~~ Harriet Martineau

Thought for Today

"I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life."

~~~~~ Walter Anderson

Thought for Today

"Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them."

~~~~~ Alan Perlis

Thought for Today

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities."

~~~~~ Josiah Stamp

Thought for Today

"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."

~~~~~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Thought for Today

"The capacity of man himself is only revealed when, under stress and responsibility, he breaks through his educational shell, and he may then be a splendid surprise to himself no less than to his teachers."

~~~~~ Dr. Harvey Cushing

Thought for Today

"A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten,' he does not say 'My men were beaten'."

~~~~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That, in a nutshell, is why Obama is not, never was, and never will be a leader.

Thought for Today

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform."

~~~~~ George Will

Thought for Today

"Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us. Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility -- without which a whole society is in jeopardy. The police cannot possibly maintain law and order by themselves. Millions of people can monitor their own behavior better than any third parties can. Cops can cope with that segment of society who have no sense of personal responsibility, but not if that segment becomes a large part of the whole population. Yet increasing numbers of educators and the intelligentsia seem to have devoted themselves to undermining or destroying a sense of personal responsibility and making 'society' responsible instead."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell