Quotes About Accountability

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay. Quellcrist Falconer Things I Should Have Learnt By Now Vol II

the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships is you.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'." — Theodore Roosevelt This is a famous quote that has been widely reprinted;

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

We are not, as we had told ourselves, the victim of circumstances. We played an active part in our own undoing.

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.

Once, we were talking about public reaction to some political scandal, and I suggested that it was normal for people to need someone to blame. 'Normal doesn't mean it's a good idea,' she answered.

We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is - was - a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else.

In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of the father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals.

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

She would certainly allow John to give himself the credit for turning her head and luring her into sin—all men like to feel they are leading the dance—but the truth was that if Susan had not made the decision to go astray, it would not be happening.

To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late.

The girl is not yours, or mine, or anyone's. But for now, she travels under my protection, and let him who lays a hand on her answer to me.

The error was not yours, Somerled, Eyvind said quietly, moving to the doorway. It was mine. I failed to teach you the one lesson you could not do without: how to be a man.

Everyone has responsibility for his own actions. But sometimes we can lose ourselves. Out of fear or sadness or guilt, we become less than we should be. It can be hard to find the courage to move on.

I learned that in the end, only I was responsible for my actions.

Choosing a standard, in other words, is to commit oneself to others.

Sometimes responsibility sneaked up on you without your seeing it coming, and then, very suddenly, it wouldn't let you go anymore.

it is neither helpful nor accurate to assume that other people are always responsible for our pain.

Every day I examine myself on three counts: in what I have undertaken on another's behalf, have I failed to do my best? In my dealings with my friends, have I failed to be trustworthy in what I say? Have I passed on to others anything that I have not tried out myself?71

Objectivity means being accountablefor marks on bodies, that is, specific materializations in their differential mattering. We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because we are chosen by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe.