Quotes About Responsibility

So thorough was his inspection that he even peeped into the latrines and fined the men who neglected to wear their helmets while engaged in one of nature's most pristine pursuits.

Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.

Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor.

The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person --- her husband.

I wish you would moderate that fondness you have for your children. I do not mean you should abate any part of your care, or not do your duty to them in its utmost extent; but I would have you early prepare yourself for disappointments, which are heavy in proportion to their being surprising.

If you see your neighbor's beard on fire, water your own. --Martinique proverb

Let those who want to hatch hatch their own eggs. ----Martinique proverb

It is easy to blame the cacique, Tahacha said. But he is only a man; he derives his power from other men, who will follow him for only as long as they believe in him. It

The sultan of our kingdom, the governor of our province, and the nobles of our city - they all owned slaves. I ignored the teachings of our Messenger, that all men are brothers, and that there is no difference among them save in the goodness of their actions. With neither care nor deliberation, I consigned these three men to a life of slavery and went to the tavern to celebrate.

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guild is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

Life won't just happen to you boy, he said. You have to happen to it.

Soldiers and children do as they're told. Children grow out of it, but soldiers just die.

You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can't expect the world to be better than we make it.

We can't expect the world to be better than we make it.

He wanted to tell her that everything he had done he had done because he was broken, because watching her die had destroyed him, but there was no way to say it that didn't sound like he was trying to pin the blame outside himself

I've seen other universes. I've been to them. And I destroyed them.

None of us became monks to be nursemaids." To which the child Lazlo replied, with fire in his soul, "And none of us became children to be orphans." But

So, you wouldn't marry me." "Ridiculous question. I'm eighteen!" "Oh, it's an age thing?" He frowned. "You don't mean wild oats, do you? We're not going to have some stupid break so you can experience other---" Zuzana put a hand over his mouth. "Gross. Don't even say it.

Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can't expect the world to be better than we make it.

You can't atone for taking one life by saving another. What good does that do the dead?" "The dead," she said. "And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you'd think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements.

They were both fomidable, but they were also the two people he cared most about in the world-Worlds-and he just wanted to carry them safley forward to the future he imagined, in which no one's life was at stake and the hardest decision of any given day might be what to eat for breakfast, or where to make love.

I kept thinking about that drawing in the war council, and our part in all of this. We cheat the bowl. We keep filling it back up, and the monsters keep stabbing their giant forks in, and because of us, there's always more for them to eat. We never lose but we never win, either. We just keep on dying. Is that what we do?

Just because the power is mine, it doesn't follow that all the choices are.

Unlike those many dead because of him, he had life, and life wasn't a default state—I am not dead, hence I must be alive—but a medium. For action, for effort. As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough.