Quotes About Accountability

What does he think I'm supposed to do?" I growled at Rahm after hearing of Carville's broadside. "Put on my fucking Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn't have to.

once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices ...Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.

But if she was being honest—and it was well past time for that—she had to acknowledge that the empty places in her life were of her own making.

The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: Nobody else is going to do this.

If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time.

penitence is more attainable than permission.

He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this? Willa asked. No. No. He said that. It couldn't have been more than a week ago. Apparently he was right. Iano, nobody gets away with murder. You can't behave like a madman when you're running for public office. That kind of trash talk is supposed to end careers.

Freedom of the presses to destroy a person's life for no good reason. (Lacuna, p. 419)

That's the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: 'Forget it. This is somebody else's problem.

We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.

If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn't technically hold it against me.

It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.

We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amens.

once that each of us is the author of our own lives? That we are responsible for what we are? For the deeds, both good and bad, that we do?

sold to the public on false pretenses, high officials confessing to ordering torture in violation of treaty and domestic law, and an economic meltdown even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges involved massive fraud—and no one has been prosecuted, no one has gone to prison, and Americans continue to dutifully cast their votes for the Democratic/Republican duopoly responsible for these disasters.

If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he'd have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and personally fight it. That'd get the politicians singing "Kumbaya" right quick.

no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.

But it is not good to forget, not to face squarely, what happened

If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.

If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.