Richard Powers Quotes

Personal responsibility is not only recognizing the errors of our ways. Personal responsibility lies in our willingness and ability to correct those errors individually and collectively.

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change.

History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.

I don't think any country is perfect. It's our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don't like. I think that's part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it.

I feel like it's actually everybody's responsibility to use whatever platform they have to do good in the world, basically, and to try to make our society better, whether you're an accountant or an activist or an athlete or whatever it is. I think it's everybody's responsibility.

I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but I don't have to go out of my way to do that.

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

I'd like to say that people... people can change anything they want to; and that means everything in the world. Show me any country and there'll be people in it. And it's the people that make the country. People have got to stop pretending they're not on the world... It's time to take that humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time... Think on that. Without people you're nothing.

I think that it's important for every single person, no matter what they do in life, to participate in the well-being of humanity and the planet. Don't let a year go by knowing you didn't make an effort to do something - no matter how small - outside your own problems and drama.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

A responsible choice is a choice that creates consequences that you are willing to assume responsibility for.

And in a democracy, when we say we're mad at what's going on, what we need to be saying is we're mad at ourselves.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

There's a definite responsibility that comes with being famous. You shouldn't be able to just dress up and look pretty.

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.

I feel like I have to be responsible for what I'm participating in or putting out into the world.

Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.

Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The European model is in danger if we obliterate the principle of personal responsibility.

It is human nature to be shortsighted and to lose momentum to make changes once the story is out of the headlines and there aren't financial incentives or political rewards. We owe to ourselves to learn from the past so we can try to do better.

Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.