Quotes About Obligation

If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.

The worst reproach to be made against police states is that they oblige—for prudence's sake—the destruction of letters and diaries, i.e., what is least false in literature.

Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.

To oblige persons often costs little and helps much.

If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!

A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making a sacrifice.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they're not discriminated on the job.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Belinda decided that she could miss doing her room with a clear conscience, as there were so many more important things to be done. It was unlikely that Miss Liversedge would be visiting them and putting them to shame by writing 'E. Liversedge' with her finger, as she had once done when Emily had neglected to dust the piano.

Doing what you love isn't a priviledge; it's an obligation.

They resented the patronage they depended upon.

Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.

Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure.

They governed from duty, heritage and habit—and, as they saw it, from right.

There is not a single right to be discovered without a duty from which it springs.

But the right of might is not a right, it is the violation of right; and the obligation to obey the strongest is not a duty, it is a physical necessity. It is playing with words to call that a right which is a faculty growing and waning with the power which imposes it, and that a duty which is necessary submission to a power against which resistance is vain.

The cross places us under a far greater obligation to love than the exodus ever could.

Life is so much easier when you just give people what they expect.

Catholocism was founded on the symbolic obligation placed upon the Pope that he remain at the centre of the world -- in the days when there was one. Today he jets off to its four corners, like a professional: apostolate by jet.

Like usual, what I want is not important, what I'm supposed to do that counts.

Realizing the responsibility I've been entrusted with... it's humbling. Very humbling.

As for restitutions, to nobody in particular do I owe any, but as for those I owe to the realm, I hope in the mercy of God.

When the country's indebtedness is so colossal and where the budget deficit is so huge, there is a moral obligation on people to pay their fair and reasonable dues.