Individual Responsibility Quotes

Occasionally, we receive questions as to the propriety of Church members receiving government assistance instead of Church assistance. Let me restate what is a fundamental principle. Individuals, to the extent possible, should provide for their own needs. Where the individual is unable to care for himself, his family should assist. Where the family is not able to provide, the Church should render assistance, not the government. We accept the basic principle that ‘though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.’ Latter-day Saints should not receive unearned welfare assistance from local or national agencies. This includes food stamps. Priesthood and Relief Society leaders should urge members to accept the Church welfare program and earn through the program that which they need, even though they may receive less food and money. By doing so, members will be spiritually strengthened, and they will maintain their dignity and self-respect.

We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Destiny is not preordained. Destiny is ordained totally by you. Every single moment of your NOW existence is the result of your previous thought. The idea that everything is already laid out for you in advance is a hallucination. You can and do manifest your own destiny.

What government is best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. […] Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. […] The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

I think the thing about capitalism is it's an evil necessity, capitalism. Communism has been tried and failed, and socialism, that doesn't work very well. Capitalism works, but the problem about capitalism is it does mean that a few individuals become very wealthy. Therefore, I think those individuals have enormous responsibility to redistribute that wealth either by creating new businesses or creating new jobs and making sure that money just doesn't lie in a bank account for future generations.

Government is not the answer to the problem - it IS the problem.

Sow a character, you reap your destiny.

The inescapable truth is: government does not have all the answers. In too many instances, government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.

A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

When you begin to speak for a nation as big as ours, it seems to me that any one individual is undertaking an extremely difficult piece of work.

Definitely, doing my solo stuff, it's fun in a different way. I get a lot more say. However, there's a lot more work to do because I have to make everything happen.

Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system - they are either useful, or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

My fear is turnout. I think a lot of people might think: 'Well, in the end, it's the rational thing to stay, but I'll let other people make that choice for me.' Don't. This is very close, no doubt about it.

I truly believe that we cannot come to a place of reconciliation until there is individual repentance and corporate repentance.

We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?