Quotes About Responsibility

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness

I left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That's what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.

There's not a chance we'll reach our full potential until we stop blaming each other and start practicing personal accountability.

Ownership: 'A commitment of the head, heart, and hands to fix the problem and never again affix the blame.

Let's take care of the little things while they're still little.

It's better to be one who is told to wait than one who waits to be told.

Accountable people look for solutions, not scapegoats. They blame no one—not even themselves. If a "self-critique" is warranted, they ask QBQs like "What could I have done differently?" and "How can I learn from this experience?

Blame and "Whodunit?" questions solve nothing. They create fear, destroy innovation, inhibit teamwork, build walls, and prevent people from engaging.

The best thing we can do to get rid of victim thinking in our world is to get rid of it in ourselves. The first QBQ guideline says all

Stress is a choice.

Questions that begin with "When" lead to procrastination.

Procrastination also increases stress. As things pile up, we begin to feel overwhelmed, which takes the joy out of our work. Bottom line: Procrastination is costly to all involved.

if someone's worked and been paid for twenty-two years, wasn't that the agreement? Don't get me wrong—loyalty is a good thing—but I have a hard time understanding why we feel we deserve something more

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child! One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it — fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and — the future.

I loathe the idea of cutting down trees. Two hundred years of shape and energy all gone in half an hour. It's revolting.

But in those four minutes the boy before you has slipped through a door, hardly opened, into that great cage which never again quite lets a man go — the cage of the Law.

we're all so interdependent that in order to look after oneself one's got to look after others no less.

Try to leave one alive… … but do not try too hard. (The Life-Taker)

I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel? Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

We were there to do what had to be done. Using napalm didn't fit with peacetime sensitivities, but peace and a return to the sensitivities that it permitted were what we were fighting to achieve.

always thought of myself as a loving person. But she was right. I had been a fair-weather friend. As long as she was happy and nice, I loved back. But if she was unhappy or upset, I would feel blamed and then argue or distance myself

A man assumes that her sudden change of mood is based solely on his behavior. When she is happy he takes credit, but when she is unhappy he also feels responsible. He may feel extremely frustrated because he doesn't know how to make things better. One minute she seems happy, and so he believes he is doing a good job and then the next minute she is unhappy. He is shocked because he thought he was doing so well.