Erich Fromm on responsibility

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’

To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

The United States stands at the pinnacle of world power. This is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future.

Winston Churchill1874–1965

• America

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.

Mark Twain1835–1910Papers of the Adam Family (1939), Part VI: “Two Fragments from a Suppressed Book Called ‘Glances at History’ or ‘Outlines of History’ “

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

Colin Powell1937–2021The Powell Principles (2003)