Quotes About Responsibility

The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

Edzard screamed at the men on the starboard side, threatening to throw them overboard if they didn't match the pace of the port team.

Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future.

In the distant past, kings had shown the world that they meant it by strapping on a sword and riding into war, putting their lives on the line. Getting behind the controls of a plane and pointing it at a runway was as close as one could reasonably come in the modern world to the same public blood oath.

This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.

Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties.

Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to act really diligent. They eat it up.

The padlocks are carried away in pomp and laid out on the stone bench where important men make it their business to keep an eye on them.

Only because Rachel knows him," I said. "Being a den-mother to wayward witches is not in my job description, and I will not play along if it requires armed men in my living room.

Ivy said, "Had we known that it was going to come down, so suddenly, to seven surviving fertile women, we would have had every healthy male masturbating into test tubes for the last three years. We'd have looked for ways to keep it all frozen. But we never imagined it would come to this.

What was that about anyway?" Peter demanded. "You could have gotten us killed!

I just saved your fucking life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You could at least offer me an Oreo." "What on earth are you talking about?" "It's like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.

I'll handle the money." "But we have no money." "That is why you need someone to handle it.

But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own fears, to project confidence at all times.

Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary.

So Enki was responsible, according to this myth, for irrigating the fields with his 'water of the heart.'

Comstock glances beadily at his wire recorders, makes sure those reels are spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up to speed. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own fears, to project confidence at all times.

But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.

Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that.

But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear: I had made a mess inside of someone else's soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me. Now it was closed. I was the only one who could clean up the mess; but in order to do this I first had to get in there. And I had no idea how, especially in the case of someone

Then he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and an important officer, in the corporation that employs them—he is paying them or oppressing them, take your pick.

Joint stock corporations are wonderful inventions that have given us many excellent goods and services. They are good at many things. Admitting failure is not one of them. Hell, they can't even admit minor shortcomings.

Much later, humans might rouse themselves to take action and be agents once again. But now and for long into the future they would be nothing more than patients.

Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth," T.R. said, "it wouldn't undo what we've done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.