Personal Responsibility Quotes

The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.

~ George R.r. Martin

...the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword....a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.

~ George R.r. Martin

Inevitability is a comfortable escape for people who don't care for the pain that comes with truth. They convince themselves that they had no hand or say in the matter, that whatever happened could not be stopped no matter what they personally did, and so blame can never be placed upon them.

~ T.a. Miles

Personal dignity begins by accepting responsibility for our actions, acting humbly, and extending compassion to other people. Personal humility requires choosing living with quietness of the heart over living in the depths of animosity, despair, and discord.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

~ Jeff Hobbs

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Each of us has an undeniable responsibility to ourself and the rest of the world to be our personal best on any given day.

~ Laurie Buchanan

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.

~ Thomas Szasz

There has been no single influence which has done more to prevent man from finding God and rebuilding his character, has done more to lower the moral tone of society than the denial of personal guilt. This repudiation of man’s personal responsibility for his action is falsely justified in two ways: by assuming that man is only an animal and by giving a sense of guilt the tag “morbid.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

We are particularly concerned with the question to what degree approval and implementation of an explanatory model minimising collective or institutional responsibility for certain problems and emphasising individual responsibility promotes detrimental perceptions and behaviours amongst individuals, who adopt and adapt similar explanations to justify their own lack of responsibility. For instance, admissibility of diminished responsibility arguments in criminal sentencing can be viewed as a direct consequence of a broader public acceptance of explanatory models purporting to prove a direct causal relationship between pharmacology, mental health and/or diminished ability to function.

~ Daniel Waterman

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

~ Jim Rohn

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.

~ Confucius

... no one can ever save someone else, you know? We can only save ourselves. You know that, don't you?

~ Carrie Jones

I began to notice something strange about the nature of incarceration; in particular, its imposition on the minds and bodies of the imprisoned, promoting a number of inmates to take personal responsibility for a system of failure beyond their control—a system built on hiding in plain sight the institutional, historical, and material limits of personal choice….Taking on the failures of a system without critically examining the limits of personal choice often led a number of cellmates to conflate their sense of responsibility with issues beyond their control.--Kalaniopua Young, “From a Native Trans Daughter

~ Eric Stanley

The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.

~ Lesslie Newbigin

We must strongly resist reductions in diversity, especially when it happens, either directly or indirectly, because of our own activities.

~ David Brandon