With great responsibility comes great power.

With great power, there must also come, great responsibility

Great power involves great responsibility

When we take responsibility for something, we are imbued with great power to make things better.

The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility.

When the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like you — black women — are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great.

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.

With great power comes great ignorance.

Given half a chance, the young, I think, can be trusted not only to accept political responsibility, but to welcome it, for with each effort to shoulder a burden comes strength, and with strength comes confidence. With confidence enough, a nation is invincible. No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.

Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being — fully conscious and fully human. In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward. You have begun the greatest adventure life has to offer: the voyage inward.

Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment.

It begins with accepting total responsibility for every aspect of your life and refusing to blame anyone else. The degree to which you accept responsibility for everything in your life is precisely the degree of personal power you have to change or create anything in your life.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.