Quotes about Responsibility

We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.

I couldn't rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure

Duty compels us to care about people that we will never meet.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or time. We are the ones we've been waiting for change we seek.

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman. It has always been up to us.

It went fine for us," I said. "But based on what I just saw, we better win this thing or the country is screwed.

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure—and a failure on my part to put those who worked under me in a position to succeed.

Whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her student aid has been cut, I'm reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?