Roberto Unger Quotes

Wouldn't it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for each other rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats.

The emphasis has been on rights, not responsibilities. When it comes to piecing together the fragments of broken lives, we have tended to place the entire burden on the state and its agencies.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

In America, we take care of each other, we support one another, and we look out for our neighbors.

If we all looked out for each other a little bit more, I think we wouldn't have a lot of the crisis that we have in today's society.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.

A person's either responsible for themselves or we're all responsible for each other.

It is only people with a sense of personal responsibility who can help others. It is only people with a sense of personal responsibility who can be helped in a lasting way.

I'm part of a community that holds each other up, and it's been great to be held up too.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don't consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other.

Ours is an individualistic society, indeed, and the state must do for the individual what the family does for the older civilizations.

Unless we labor to help others achieve a reasonable stake in society, we may find ourselves losing the society in which we have too great a stake.

There is no such thing as society…There are individuals, men and women, and there are families.

The world does not owe any man a living, but we all owe one another a living.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called 'It Takes a Village.' And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, 'What the heck do you mean by that?' This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.

People care for their community and will invest in their community and will look out for each other if they are challenged to do so.

We must absolutely take care of one another.

We should be developing spaces and places that are thinking about how we care for the group vs. asking the individual to take care of themselves.

I want to support the communities that support me.

The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.

I was raised to believe that everybody has a responsibility to their community and I use the word very loosely. It's a big community. If I get recognized in the middle of the Sinai Desert I have a big community.

Be compassionate, and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much a better place.

If we don't take care of each other, who will? ... I don't want to ever say, 'I should've done something.'