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Daily Inspiration Quote by Chris Matthews

"I don't believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question - you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you"

About this Quote

Matthews is doing a very particular kind of media judo here: he’s defending silence as a form of dignity, not evasion. As a journalist, he made a career out of extracting answers, so the line lands with extra bite. It’s not an anti-press screed; it’s a boundary-drawing move from someone who knows exactly how the game works and how often it slides from scrutiny into entitlement.

The intent is to reframe a familiar cable-news ritual - the gotcha personal question, the demand for a confession, the insinuation that refusal equals guilt. Matthews flips the burden: the real ethical problem isn’t the non-answer, it’s the ask. “No responsibility” is doing heavy lifting, importing a moral vocabulary into what’s usually treated as pure optics. He’s telling viewers to stop confusing access with authority.

The subtext is about consent and power. Personal questions aren’t neutral; they’re leverage. They can be used to humiliate, to steer a narrative, to force someone into either disclosure or defensive posture. By saying people have “no right” to ask, Matthews is also quietly critiquing the audience’s appetite for intimacy-as-accountability, that modern expectation that public figures owe us their private lives as proof of authenticity.

Context matters: this sounds like a response to a moment when the press is being accused, sometimes fairly, of turning politics and celebrity into the same content slurry. Matthews isn’t absolving public figures of real oversight; he’s insisting that accountability has a jurisdiction, and that privacy is not automatically forfeited at the studio door.

Quote Details

TopicHuman Rights
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Matthews, Chris. (n.d.). I don't believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question - you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-believe-he-had-a-responsibility-to-even-73875/

Chicago Style
Matthews, Chris. "I don't believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question - you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-believe-he-had-a-responsibility-to-even-73875/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I don't believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question - you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-believe-he-had-a-responsibility-to-even-73875/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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Chris Matthews (born December 17, 1945) is a Journalist from USA.

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