Accountability is not for others; it is for you. You are accountable to God and yourself when you decide to take or reject responsibility, whether a job, home, defending our country, starting a family, putting up with big pressure, holding your tongue, making ends meet, or all of the above.
Robert B. Charles, Mark Twain and Education
A virtuous person loves the right and the good. Virtue is not behavior, though it nearly always results in behavior. Actions are the outworking of a person’s virtue, which is cultivated into his or her character. Under this Christian ethical system, any given choice is a function of virtue.
Battle For the American Mind, by Pete Hegseth with David Goodwin, pg.165
Victor Hugo
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.
Amelia Earhart American aviator (1897-1937)
What is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke, British Statesman.
Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg.17
Whether or not we believe in God, we should regard the hardships of our lives as tests of our characters. Though we are not free to choose our hardships, we are free to choose how we react to them.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.151
[M]any people act as if intelligence is the most important quality in a human being. With regard to children, for example, middle- and upper-middle-class parents usually boast most about their intelligence: how “bright” they are, how well they do in school, and what university they attended. Few parents say to their child, “I care more about your character than about your grades.” Nor do most parents teach their children that clear thinking and common sense are more important than brains.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.80.
A good start, a willingness—even eagerness—to work beyond the call of duty, a sense of fair play, and a recognition of opportunities before and when they arrive. In other words, it is important to find a course and steer it.
James Rorimer, when asked what his formula for success was. The Monuments Men, pg.418.
[A] good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.
George Washington (1790)
Half of popular psychology is devoted to praising human dignity and the other half to excusing us from responsibility. But what kind of dignity is that? It’s no good to tell a man he’s fully human in one breath, and then with the next suggest he’s no more accountable than a vegetable. These contradictions in theory eventually do show up in practice. … The reluctance to convict, the backlog of court cases, and the increase in criminal behavior are due at least in part to the new notion that right and wrong are to be measured by psychological rather than legal and moral criteria, and to the equally dubious notion that judges and juries should play the role of therapists.
William Kirk Kilpatrick, Psychological Seduction: The Failure of Modern Psychology, pg.84
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington.
It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic” speech, Paris, France, 23 April 1910
Throughout much of the twentieth century, there was a subtle and, at times, obvious campaign to separate virtue from talent, to divide character from success. The latest in this line of attack is the emphasis on diversity—that some how merely having different skin shades or national origins makes America special. But it was not the color of the skin of people who came here that made them special, it was the content of their character. America remains a beacon of liberty, not merely because its institutions have generally remained strong, its citizens free, and its attitudes tolerant, but because it, among most of the developed world, still cries out as a nation, “Character counts.”
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg. xviii.
