Ethical Accountability Quotes

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

Could this country stand by and watch the [most] direct crime that ever stained the face of history, and thus become participators in the sin.

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

There are no innocent bystanders.

The more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear, toward others as well as ourselves.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.

From a just fraud God turneth not away.

The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, are bound to their actions, have their actions as their refuge. It is action that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.

What use of oaths, of promise, or of test, where men regard no God but interest?

In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity.

... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has become aware of.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them

He who wrongs the innocent must bear the fruit of his act, like dust flung against the wind.

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to black Americans you lack moral authority.