Quotes About Responsibility

Blamelessness does not relieve us of responsibility

It wasn't the soldiers who changed. It was the leader.

Why am I doing this? What does this have to do with being a good commander, making one boy the target of all the others? Just because they did it to me, why should I do it to him? Ender wanted to undo his taunting of the boy, wanted to tell the others that the little one needed his help and friendship more than anything else. But of course Ender couldn't do that. Not on the first day. On the first day even his mistakes had to look like part of a brilliant plan.

Yes, he was alone, but he needed to be alone; until now, he had not really understood how painful and heavy it was to have the needs of others always in his heart and on his mind.

Everything I hated in a commander, and I'm doing it. Is it some law of human nature you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that's so.

It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.

The pride of universal guilt. It's a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people's suffering came about as punishment for her sins.

When you don't understand the consequences for your acts, how can you be blamed for them?

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

When God anoints a person, a pattern of testing appears to take place at specific times in the leader's life. God often takes each leader through four major tests to determine if that person will achieve God's ultimate call on his or her life. The person's response to these tests is the deciding factor in whether they can advance to the next level of responsibility in God's Kingdom.

You can achieve the greatest things in the world, but if it is at the cost of your marriage or family, it is worth nothing.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.

Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.

I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

Duty is what one expects from others.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.