Duty Quotes

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No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.

Theodore Roosevelt

The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.

Thomas Jefferson

The Church has a special duty to safeguard and strengthen the sacredness of the Eucharist. In our pluralistic and often deliberately secularized society, the living faith of the Christian community - a faith always aware of its rights vis-a-vis those who do not share the faith - ensures respect for this sacredness

Pope John Paul II

What wouldst thou do, old man?
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak
When power to flattery bows?

William Shakespeare

The scouts' motto is founded on my initials. It is: Be Prepared, which means, you are always to be in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty.

Robert Baden-Powell

How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.

The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thomas Jefferson

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.

I deem it the duty of every man to devote a certain portion of his income for charitable purposes; and that it is his further duty to see it so applied and to do the most good for which it is capable.

Thomas Jefferson

It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one's neighbor.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.

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

God assigns as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman.

Pope John Paul II

To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

George Washington

I insist, that if there is ANY THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.

Abraham Lincoln

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.

One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.

The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

George Washington

To go to prison because of your convictions and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.

Europe has its history, often tragic, though at intervals consoling. But to speak of any universally recognized national rights or that these rights have played any part in its history, is to play with the powers of public credulity. Always the first duty of a state has been its safety; the pledge of its safety, its power; and the limits of its power, that intelligence of which each has been made the depository. When the great powers have proclaimed any other principle, it has been only for their own purposes, and the smaller powers have never received any benefit from it.

Napoleon I of France

The whisper of a beautiful woman can be heard farther than the loudest call of duty.

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

George Bernard Shaw