Quotes About Responsibility

It is we ourselves who are responsible for knowing the truth

It's why the Delta doesn't progress. It's not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.

The people in charge blame the whites, blame the parents, blame the teachers, blame the students, and now they're blaming the buildings. The facilities are run-down because they haven't maintained them properly. They say there's no money for maintenance, but they spend a fortune on hiring consultant after consultant. Oh my God, so many consultants when we didn't have any textbooks or paper.

Any white person who doesn't care about the public schools is a fool. The whole future of this town depends on fixing the public schools, so we can stop our population decline and attract new families and businesses. If we can't fix the schools, I'm afraid we're going to lose the town.

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

In Hamburg on 30 April 1945, hearing of Hitler's death, which she believed to have been caused by his having poisoned himself, Luise Solmitz at last felt free to release the hatred that she had been building up for him over the previous months. He was, she wrote in her diary, 'the shabbiest failure in world history'. He was 'uncompromising, unbridled, irresponsible', qualities that had at first brought him success but then led to catastrophe. 'National

Heinrich Himmler declared: 'Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

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

Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.

No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with.

If you don't know the men at your back by name, don't be surprised if they won't follow you into battle. On the other hand, don't be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood.

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.

It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat's maze poorly.

Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you're at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were — mostly — if you did all that, you'd never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a slave collar.

He'd already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes.

You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

She said, I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don't call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

In the end, she realized, he had successfully invited them all to die simply by promising to do it with them. It was all they would ask of any commander.

Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you're no longer a soldier. You're just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.

They tell you to save the ship at all costs. No one ever talks about whether the passengers and crew deserve all that effort.

You'd think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate.

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

Comme Bancroft, MacIntyre avait été un homme de pouvoir et, comme tous les hommes de pouvoir, quand il parlait de prix, vous pouviez être sûr d'une chose : C'était quelqu'un d'autre qui payait.