Quotes About Accountability

Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror.

if we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well. And I end by challenging people to ask themselves whether we can continue to allow the government, subject as it is to every imaginable form of inefficiency and corruption, to have such power to kill. (p. 130)

Who killed this man [Patrick Sonnier]? Nobody. Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job - the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. (p. 101)

If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.

If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.

My shortcomings are no excuse for others acting in that way," Wallander said. "Not my superior in any case.

We also need guides: spiritual friends, a spiritual director, or a spiritual accountability group that can function for us as a safe place to bear our souls.

The goal of spiritual direction is spiritual formation—the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart. A spiritual life cannot be formed without discipline, practice, and accountability.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.

If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

En général, les hommes, sous un gouvernement comme le nôtre, croient de leur devoir d'attendre que la majorité se soit rendue à leurs raisons. Ils croient que s'ils résistaient, le remède serait pire que le mal ; mais si le remède se révèle pire que le mal, c'est bien la faute du gouvernement. C'est lui le responsable.

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?

The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer's money that no one is willing to take with his own.

No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies. After

The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be – it can't be helped – in a chronic state of rabies.

When I'm bad I am bad !

grave inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity.

She was suffering the first pang of maturity's burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused.

We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.

Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.

I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.