Responsibility In Frankenstein Quotes

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels. After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in his mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively at the night sky.

My favorite historical response to someone hearing about a “big” death comes from the character Henry Clerval in Mary Shelley’s masterwork, Frankenstein. When Henry learns that his best friend Victor Frankenstein’s young brother William has been murdered, he says, “I can offer you no consolation, my friend. Your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?” Perfect. There is no consolation. The disaster is irreparable. I’ve read Frankenstein twice since our Henry died. It is my companion in grief. It should surprise no one who reads it that Mary Shelley was a bereaved mother.

Don't victimize yourself under the guise of taking responsibility. That's not an apology, that's self-pity.

It was on a meteorologically challenged November night that Frankenstein infused the spark of being into the creature and saw its dull yellow eye open. Breathless horror filled Frankenstein's heart as a vision of the next twenty years flashed through his mind. There would be responsibilities--schooling, education, clothing--and he was a lone parent!

We’ve always had strong moral responsibility, or we should have had, to other species,’ says Richard Twine, the British sociologist. ‘We just haven’t exercised that very well.

Any informed debate about how and why we have an Electoral College must begin with these often forgotten circumstances of its birth. It was not, as many of us learned in school, a brilliant part of the framers’ plan. It did not reflect any coherent political theory but flowed instead from deals the delegates had made in response to the specific conflicts they faced at a particular moment in history. It was settled on only after every other method failed to win enough support. It was, in the words of one constitutional scholar, a “Frankenstein compromise,” adopted mainly so the delegates could finish their work and go home.

Latour’s entreaty to “love your monsters” has become a rallying cry in certain green circles, particularly among those most determined to find climate solutions that adhere to market logic. And the idea that our task is to become more responsible Dr. Frankensteins, ones who don’t flee our creations like deadbeat dads, is unquestionably appealing. But it’s a terribly poor metaphor for geoengineering. First, “the monster” we are being asked to love is not some mutant creature of the laboratory but the earth itself. We did not create it; it created—and sustains—us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

IN A MUCH QUOTED PASSAGE in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive. The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is

Eleanor. Frank had once seen an image of a tsunami wave carrying hundreds of species of sea life within it, sharks and stingrays and schools of silver-backed fish, all lifted high in the wave's arc before crashing onto land. That was what it felt like whenever he was near Eleanor. They had never touched, never kissed, but his response to her was titanic. Everything in him rose to meet her.

That was what it felt like whenever he was near Eleanor. They had never touched, never kissed, but his response to her was titanic. Everything in him rose to meet her.