Quotes About Accountability

Blaming others is excusing yourself.

Keep in mind that democracy merely gives power to the people; it does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.

does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.

When bad things unexpectedly happen, as they always do, or when serious errors in judgment occur, as they do more often than most of us wish to admit, accountable companies and their executives take action to control the damage and set a new course for achieving results.

But even in the worst of such circumstances, people can't move forward if they just sit around feeling powerless and blaming others for their misery.

Remember, getting stuck in the victim cycle is not bad, it's just not effective. It keeps you from getting results.

They view painful situations as accidents, bad luck, or something that was done to them. But many of the problems we face in life are not accidents. Most of the time our problems are ones we bring on ourselves

They view painful situations as accidents, bad luck, or something that was done to them. But many of the problems we face in life are not accidents. Most of the time our problems are ones we bring on ourselves. This is why learning to Own It is so important.

Asking "What else can I do?" is the very essence of taking accountability and is the Solve It question. It's all about your ability to engage personally, and deeply, with what you can and should be doing, despite the gravitational tug from all the reasons/excuses that can drag you down Below The Line.

There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

What else can I do? are perhaps the five most powerful words anyone can say

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.

Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon

Finance is often poetically just; it punishes the reckless with special fervor.

a free economy is an economy run by free beings. And free beings are responsible beings. Economic transactions in a regime of private property depend not only on distinguishing mine from yours, but also on relating me to you. Without accountability, nobody is to be trusted, and without trust the virtues that are attributed to the free economy would not arise. Every

Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.

Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.

When the judge asks me why I put poison in my wife's tea, he will not be satisfied by my saying 'Because electrical impulses from my brain caused my hand to reach for the bottle of arsenic and tip it into the waiting teacup'...

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

From this arises the belief that the order of nature is all that there really is. But to draw that conclusion would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the Lebenswelt is irreducible. We understand and relate to it using concepts of agency and accountability that have no place in the physical sciences; to use the idiom of Sellars, the Lebenswelt exists in "the space of reasons," not in "the space of law.

Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make elected politicians accountable.

When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because we externalize the costs of what we do; and the solution is to find the motives that will return the costs to the one who creates them.