Quotes About Accountability

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren't a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them. When

you aren't a failure until you start to blame.

work toward curing yourself of the need to blame. Move beyond thinking about fault and blame.

Iacocca, Dunlap, Lay and Skilling, Case and Levin. They show what can happen when people with the fixed mindset are put in charge of companies. In each case, a brilliant man put his company in jeopardy because measuring himself and his legacy outweighed everything else.

John Wooden, el legendario entrenador de baloncesto, dice que no eres un fracasado hasta que no empiezas a culpar

When politicians' backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it. The phrase "mistakes were made" is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke—what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the "past exonerative" tense.

It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. —Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist

When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.

Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, 'He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,' were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.

We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

the policies that permitted it. "Without a mutual acknowledgment of mistakes made, and some form of accountability, another reversion to torture may be difficult to prevent," says political scientist Darius Rejali. "Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity."25 Impunity, in turn, rewards self-justification, not only in the perpetrators but also in the nation that exonerates them.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.

The assholes are always puzzled when the order of the universe is restored, when they are held accountable for their cowardly, pretentious, loveless ways.

It wasn't my fault that Candace followed me down to the water's edge and it wasn't my fault that I picked her up and held her down in the water and watched her pass on to the great beyond. She wanted to be there, or she wouldn't have gone down there with me. She knew she was killing me and she knew that I was not the type to go down without a fight.

There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.

You didn't tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.

Everyone knows that the people in the marriage are the ones responsible for the marriage, everyone except married people...

That's a cheat,' I say. 'You can't go through life blaming your childhood for the way you are as an adult.

But anyone with a phone knows that there are very few actual mistakes when it comes to the things we put in writing, especially after a few drinks.

Look at me, because in my eyes you will see hundreds of thousands of eyes staring at you, and in my voice you will hear hundreds of thousands of voices accusing you.' (Moorehead, 2011, 300)

Any kid what begs for a whippin' can find one.