Quotes About Duty

Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.

He did what he thought was right

We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

My assignment from Graff, thought Theresa, is to become an assassin in order to protect my son. And the truly horrifying thing is that I'm not questioning whether to do it, but how. And when.

Wasn't that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted.

And yet they obey and will continue to obey the orders that come to them. As in the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, these soldiers give up their lives, trusting that their commanders are using them well. While we sit safely here in these simulator rooms, playing an elaborate computer game, they are obeying, dying so that all of humankind can live.

She is a woman, and so she dreams of freedom, of an hour in which there is no duty waiting to be done. No wonder there is revolution burning in her words, and yet they remain always words and never violence.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

I slept and dreamt life is beauty, I woke and found life is duty.

To see what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

You are not yet able to serve men, how can you serve spirits?

To see what's right and not do it is cowardice.

The Jitong chapter of the Book of Rites says, "There are three ways of caring for one's parents: when they are alive, look after them; when they are deceased, tend to the death rites; when the death rites have been completed, offer them sacrifice.

He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?

Since I spend my working days studying trends, many of which are downright disgusting, I feel it's my duty after work to encourage the trends I'd like to see catch on, like signaling before you change lanes, and chocolate cheesecake. And reading. Also

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Ich kann nicht anders.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.