This is the law: The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.
- Topic: Responsibility
- Location: Arches National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from John Steinbeck
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day; it helps. Then, when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
More Quotes from Arches National Park
More on Responsibility
We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are—that is a fact.
In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.
I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.
If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light.
Next to the assumption of power is the responsibility of relinquishing it.
Champions take responsibility. When the ball is coming over the net, you can be sure I want the ball.
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.