Quotes About Duty

As an accurate thinker, it is both your privilege and your duty to avail yourself of facts, even though you must go out of your way to get them. If you permit yourself to be swayed to and fro by all manner of information that comes to your attention, you will never become an accurate thinker; and if you do not think accurately, you cannot be sure of attaining the object of your definite chief aim in life.

Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way).

Heikot toimivat tarpeidensa mukaan, vahvemmat velvollisuutensa.

People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession, rather than find a profession that fits their ethics.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Out of fear, out of the desire for approval, out of misguided notions of duty, people surrender themselves--their convictions and their aspirations--every day. There is nothing noble about it. It takes far more courage to fight for your values than to relinquish them.

As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him

Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one's self in its awful place,—out of these, and other motives as miserable as these, comes your idea of duty!

As your older brother, it's my sacred duty to save you from yourself. She brings her fists down on the table, making all the dinner plates jump. The ONLY reason you're fifteen minutes older than me is because you cut in front of the line, as usual!

Thou shalt kill.

As scythes, it is not what we want that matters—all that matters is what the world needs us to be. As your High Blade, I will hold us to the highest ideals, so that we can be proud of who, and what, we are.

Those who wish to have the job should not have it… and those who would most refuse to kill are the only ones who should.

But my pain must not prevent me from doing the right thing.

Il n'y a de grand parmi les hommes que le poète, le prêtre et le soldat; l'homme qui chante, l'homme qui bénit, l'homme qui sacrifie et se sacrifie. Le reste est fait pour le fouet.

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.

just in proportion as you hunger and thirst after righteousness, and wish and try simply and humbly to do your duty in that station to which God has called you, and to learn joyfully and trustingly anything and everything which God may see fit to teach you.  Then as your day your strength shall be.  Then will the Lord teach you, and inform you with his eye, and guide you in the way wherein you should go. 

What breeds more close communion between subjects than allegiance to the same queen? between brothers, than duty to the same father? between the devout, than adoration for the same Deity? And shall not worship for the same beauty be likewise a bond of love between the worshippers? and each lover see in his rival not an enemy, but a fellow-sufferer?

The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.

Starships are all work and no fun.

We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes.

you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?

I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;

And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty.