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Home > Financial Quotes > Responsibility

Financial Quotes

Responsibility Quotes

  • "I take responsibility. It wasn’t the board. It wasn’t my colleagues at Time Warner. It wasn’t the bankers or the lawyers … I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently, and it is time for those involved in companies to stand up and say, “You know what, I am solely responsible for it. I was the CEO, I was in charge.”"
    Jerry Levin (1939–), US former CEO of Time Warner
    On Time Warner’s disastrous merger with AOL in 2000
    Source: Interview on CNBC TV (January 5, 2010)
  • "Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn't deliver, the king cut off his head."
    Alvin Toffler (1928–), US social commentator
    Source: “Breaking with Bureaucracy,” Across the Board (February 1991)
  • "We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible."
    Allan Massie (1938–), British author
    Source: “Etienne,” A Question of Loyalties (1989), pt. 3, ch. 22
  • "Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them."
    Alan Jay Perlis (1922–1990), US computer scientist
    Source: Epigrams in Programming (1985)
  • "Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity."
    Nadine Gordimer (1923–), South African novelist and short-story writer
    Source: “Lecture, University of Michigan,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Sterling M. McMurrin, ed, 1985)
  • "The buck stops here."
    Harry S. Truman (1884–1972), US president
    Sign on his desk while president.
    Source: Quoted in Presidential Anecdotes (Paul F. Boiler, 1981)
  • "I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be “happy.” I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference, that you lived at all."
    Leo C. Rosten (1908–1997), US author and humorist
    Source: Passions and Prejudices (1978)
  • "The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all."
    Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Russian author and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature
    Source: Nobel lecture (1970)
  • "There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to the same thing. Deny your responsibility."
    Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973), US president
    Source: Speech (September 1967)
  • "People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals."
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and playwright
    Source: Quoted in Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts (Christopher Hassall, 1959), ch. 6
  • "Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right than to be responsible and wrong."
    Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British prime minister
    Source: Party political broadcast, London (August 26, 1950)
  • "I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."
    Harry S. Truman (1884–1972), US president
    Said on succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt as president.
    Source: Attributed (April 1944)
  • "Responsibility is the great developer of men."
    Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), US management thinker and author
    Source: Dynamic Administration (1941)
  • "It is impossible to get the measure of what an individual can accomplish unless the responsibility is given him."
    Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966), US president of General Motors
    Source: “Modern Ideas of the Big Business World,” Work (October 1926)
  • "Whatever you blame, that you have done yourself."
    Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), German psychoanalyst
    Source: The Book of the It (1923), Letter 14
  • "Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it."
    Malcolm S. Forbes (1919–1990), US publisher
    Source: Attributed

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