Quotes About Responsibility

I'm glad someone besides myself gives him a hard time. He needs it, you know. All those people bowing and scraping. It's not good for him." Her hands were freezing, so she shoved them into her pockets. "I do my best, Raven," the priest admitted, "but we don't need to tell him. Some things are best kept between us.

I don't want to put you in the position of having to lie, Father. I find myself doing enough of that for Mikhail, and I'm not even certain why. Lord knows, he doesn't ask me to." There was sorrow in her voice, regret, confusion. "I wouldn't lie," he said. "Is omission the same thing as a lie, Father?

He's really a prince?" For some reason that dismayed her. On top of everything else, she was contemplating a commitment to royalty. Those things never worked out.

The gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability.

Bryant lurched away from the kerb and out into the traffic without bothering to look or signal. He'd come to anticipate the chorus of horns greeting his entry into the traffic stream, rather as bugles announced the arrival of Caesar.

gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability

People must really adore dogs to fondle their warm bowel movements every day.

There is a special place in hell for people who bring children into this world solely for the sake of seeming better than they are.

He loved his wife and his kids right up to the moment it threatened his ability to have a good time, to be adored.

The lesson of the biblical tale of Noah's ark was a simple one, a refrain that echoed throughout the Old Testament: Behave, or God will fuck you up.

The lesson of the biblical tale of Noah's ark was a simple one, a refrain that echoed throughout the Old Testament: behave, or God will fuck you up.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.

You have to choose your future regrets.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father. And it's an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn't really one's job to rear one's parents.

T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

Rights have to be asserted. Animals cannot make such assertions. We have to make representations to ourselves on their behalf.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

The deficit, then, is not the difference between what America spends and what America earns; it is, to a striking extent, the difference between what the rich owe and what the rich pay.