Duty Quotes

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From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Return to the villages means a definite, voluntary recognition of the duty of bread labour and all its connotes.

It is the duty of a non-co-operator to preach disaffection towards the existing order of things. Non-co-operators are but giving disciplined expression to a nation's outraged feelings.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Winston Churchill

Mr. [Henry] James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

As long as the bourgeois parliament remains a means of duping the workers, and phrases about democracy are used to cover up financial swindling and every kind of bribery (the particularly subtle brand of bribery the bourgeoisie practise with regard to writers, N. P. s, lawyers, and others is nowhere to be seen on so wide a scale as in the bourgeois parliament), we Communists are in duty bound to be in this very institution (which is supposed to express the people's will but actually covers up the deception of the people by the wealthy) to untiringly expose this deception, and expose each and every case of the Renners and Co.'s desertion to the capitalists, against the workers

The liberal party is a party which believes that, as new conditions an problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

William Shakespeare

First you must have faith in an eternal world independent of you; then you must have faith in your ability to perceive it, and finally you must try to explain it by means of concepts or mathematical constructions. But don't always accept traditional concepts without reexamining them. Even overthrow my relativity theory, if you find a better one.... You must believe that the world was created as a unified whole which is comprehensible to man. Of course, it's going to take an infinitely long time to investigate this unified creation. But to me that is the highest and most sacred duty—unifying physics. Simplicity is the criterion of the universe.

Albert Einstein

Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation — to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoliation desolate the country.

Thomas Jefferson

When two nations are fighting, the duty of a votary of ahimsa is to stop the war.

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Charles Dickens

Soldiers — You are about to return to your homes and your friends, after having, as I learn, performed in camp a comparatively short term of duty in this great contest. I am greatly obliged to you, and to all who have come forward at the call of their country.

Abraham Lincoln

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Abraham Lincoln

We are sensible of the duty and expediency of submitting our opinions to the will of the majority, and can wait with patience till they get right if they happen to be at any time wrong.

Thomas Jefferson

Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.

What's a man's first duty? The answer's brief: to be himself.

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Winston Churchill

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

The less we show our love to a woman,
Or please her less, and neglect our duty,
The more we trap and ruin her surely
In the flattering toils of philandery.

Alexander Pushkin

None of the things they learn, should ever be made a burthen to them, or impos's on them as a task. Whatever is so proposed, presently becomes irksome; the mind takes an aversion to it, though before it were a thing of delight or indifferency. Let a child but be ordered to whip his top at a certain time every day, whether he has or has not a mind to it; let this be but requir'd of him as a duty, wherein he must spend so many hours morning and afternoon, and see whether he will not soon be weary of any play at this rate. Is it not so with grown men?

Your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God's will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is the duty of all persons, when affairs are the most prosperous, 12 then in especial to reflect within themselves in what way they are to endure adversity.

Since those whose duty it was to hold the sword of France have let it fall, I have picked up its broken point.

Charles de Gaulle

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me.

Abraham Lincoln