A lot of the world’s current problems probably stem from the fact that most people think of responsibility in terms of short-term personal duty. Maybe we need to maintain a longer view.

If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.
- Abigail Van Buren

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
- Jonas Salk

In times like these men should utter nothing for which they would not be willingly responsible through time and in eternity.
- Abraham Lincoln

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
- Richard P. Feynman

When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.
- Louis Nizer

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else.
- Ivern Ball

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens?  A terrible thing:  no one to blame.
- Erica Jong

It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.
- Josiah Charles Stamp

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
- Malcolm Forbes

Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
- Thomas Szasz

America went through a shameful downgrade of their international credit rating last week, mostly thanks to politicians shirking their responsibilities. This week of course, they’ll be spending all their time in finger pointing contests. Politicians probably understand responsibility better than anybody. That’s why they’re so good at dodging it!

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
- Ronald Reagan

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.
- John F. Kennedy

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.
- Lyndon B. Johnson

We have the Bill of Rights.  What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.
- Bill Maher

It’s a question of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.
- The Little Prince

48% of the notes printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are one dollar bills.

4,010,830,000 pennies were minted in 2010. Four billion pennies is only 40 million dollars.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

This week’s quotes were dedicated to the immature, irresponsible, and indecisive US Congress as they hemmed and hawed over economic policy decisions  that could grind the global economy to a halt. Today the theme is indecision:

Indecision may or may not be my problem.
- Jimmy Buffett

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up.
- Mark Twain

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
- Aneurin Bevan

Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This week was the deadline for those silly men of the US congress to make some decisions to avert the econopocalypse, so this week’s quotes have been devoted to greed, thrift, debt, and indecision.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey

Thrift comes too late when you find it at the bottom of your purse.
- Seneca

He who does not economize will have to agonize.
- Confucius

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
- Benjamin Franklin

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.
- John D. Rockefeller

TRUST, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public enemies.
- Ambrose Bierce

I was brought up in an era when thrift was still considered a virtue.
- Paul Getty

You cannot bring about prosperity without discouraging thrift.
- Paul Getty

Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.
- Calvin Coolidge

In honor of the United States’ insanely immature economic policy-making, this week’s quotes are devoted to debt, thrift, greed, and indecision.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
- Gandhi

To greed, all nature is insufficient.
- Seneca

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
- P.J. O’Rourke

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
- Cyril Connolly

Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down.
- Charles Adams

The covetous man is ever in want.
- Horace

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
- Frederick Keonig

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
- Oscar Wilde

You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
- Eric Hoffer

There must be more to life than having everything!
- Maurice Sendak

Greed: A word commonly used by liberals, low achievers, anti-capitalists and society’s losers to denigrate, shame and discredit those who have acquired superior job skills and decision-making capabilities and who, through the application of those job skills have accumulated wealth.
- Neal Boortz

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have – and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.
- Paul Heyne

In honor of the United States’ insanely immature economic policy-making, this week’s quotes are devoted to debt, thrift, greed, and indecision.

Debt is the slavery of the free.
- Publilius Syrus

Debts and lies are generally mixed together
- Francois Rabelais

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
- Ambrose Bierce

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
- Wendell Phillips

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
- Herbert Hoover

Creditors have better memories than debtors.
- Benjamin Franklin

Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways.
- Will Rogers

A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy
- Publilius Syrus

If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.
- John Maynard Keynes

Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain.
- Moliere

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people”
- Wendell Phillips

This week’s theme was “success”, but it’s hard to measure the kinds of success that aren’t financial. So here are some quick facts about wealth:

The average age of Forbes’s 400 wealthiest individuals is 63.

There are about 10 million millionaires in the world.

Only about 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth.

The 80,000 or so people around the world classified as “ultra-high net worth”  – i.e., possessing over $30 million in assets – have on average eight cars, three to four homes, a jet aircraft, and a yacht.