Quotes About Responsibility

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

the good citizen is the one who knows when voting is the wrong way to decide a question, as well as when voting is the right way. For

Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved. Like

Why do the defenders of the market not raise their voices against the practice of externalizing costs in that way? After

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.

The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And

Hence, by a series of almost unnoticed changes, allowing ever easier divorce, and ever more blatant neglect of children, the state has overseen the gradual undoing of the marriage vow, to

If we base our love for our dog on the premise that he, like us, is a person, then we damage both him and ourselves. We damage him by making demands that no animal can fully understand – holding him to account in ways that make no sense to him. We will feel bound to keep him alive, as we keep each other alive, for the sake of a relation that, being personal, is also eternal.

I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings – certain basic goods, including life itself, that cannot be taken away from them unless they in some way forfeit them. Life

Accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession.

Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other words, economic order depends on moral order.

People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.

We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The

Personal feelings don't make for good politics, legal decisions, or business deals.

But it is written that it is better to burn one city than to curse the darkness.

Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn't.

Life is sufficiently furnished that one need not go looking about for extra guilt.

Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it

My father, and most of the others in Amber and the Courts, swear by the heavy, awkward things, but they are probably made of sterner stuff than myself.

On jest moim bratem. Ale to nie moja wina.

I think he knows exactly what he is doing, and whether we like it or not, I think he is the only one who can deal with the present situation.

This girl either brings out the worst in me or shuts me down completely. Not true. I did it myself. Still....

Acquit yourself as well as I have-bastard!