Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

- Vaclav Havel

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

- Henri-Frederic Amiel

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

- Marie Curie

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.

- Madame de Stael

Love is a better teacher than duty.

- Albert Einstein

Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished.

- Madame de Stael

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

- Paul Ricoeur

We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

- Lyndon B. Johnson

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

- Lillian Hellman

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.

- Elie Wiesel

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

- Albert Schweitzer

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

- Bertrand Russell

Only do what your heart tells you.

- Princess Diana

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

- Denis Diderot

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

- Epictetus

The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.

- Paul Ricoeur



Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

- Thomas Carlyle



Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

- Eleanor Roosevelt



When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

- Eleanor Roosevelt



Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

- Immanuel Kant



Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

- Mark Twain



There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

- Mark Twain



As far as I know, to date, this Earth is the only thing we have at our disposal. The trick is to NOT dispose of it, yanno?

- Winter BelViso



What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

- Victor Frankl



We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we stop saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."

- Sydney J. Harris



There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

- Robert Louis Stevenson



Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

- Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC



No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

- Voltaire



How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Arctic Dreams

- Barry Lopez



Think of giving not as a duty but as a privilege.

- John D. Rockefeller



My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

- Elaine Maxwell



Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

- Virginia Woolf



Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

- George Bernard Shaw



Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up there pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others -- and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet.

- Eda LeShan



Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.

1908 speech

- Eugene V. Debs



The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

- Albert Einstein



It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910

- Theodore Roosevelt



Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

- Peter F. Drucker



The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

- Stanley Milgram



She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions -- and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

- Marcia Muller



The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

- Nancy Friday



Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

- Nancy Friday



Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him, and then choose that way with all his strength.

- Hasidic saying