Top 88 Quotes About Moral Duty
#1. Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
#2. [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
Ayn Rand
#3. Sacrifice demands the surrender of things we cherish above all else. Only out of the agony of those loses can a new resolution be born. An undying devotion to a cause greater than one's self, and a moral duty to see a journey through to its absolute completion.
Emily Thorne
#4. If we cannot end the conflict, we have an inescapable moral duty to help refugees and provide legal avenues to safety.
Angelina Jolie
#5. The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.
Che Guevara
#6. To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Ernst Fischer
#7. If obedience invariably leads to cruelty, disobedience is our moral duty.
Martin Firrell
#8. The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.
George Washington
#9. I now feel that I have a moral duty to course correct and say wait a minute, it's not just for adults.
Francoise Mouly
#10. The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.
Ken Liu
#11. Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
Etty Hillesum
#12. I am sick and tired of hearing that it is our moral duty to serve the state, because conservatives believe that it is our moral duty to serve our fellow man regardless of race, sex, affiliation or creed, and when we serve, we believe that it is the state's duty to get out of the way.
Allen West
#14. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.
C.S. Lewis
#15. Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room. Lucy was fully supportive.
Paul Kalanithi
#16. I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.
David Guterson
#18. If your reason for worshipping God is merely from a sense of moral duty, God would rather you not worship Him at all. To say that God is pleased with worship that lacks passion is to say God endorses hypocrisy.
Sam Storms
#19. On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
#20. The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.
Thomas Paine
#21. The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
Edward Abbey
#22. By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties.
Wilhelm Frick
#23. If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants. One of the greatest services Christianity has rendered the world has been its consecration of poverty, and its elevation of labor to the dignity of a moral duty.
Orestes Brownson
#24. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Donna Tartt
#25. When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.
Arthur Miller
#26. Today there are a lot places where people say they're just hopeless. If I can come from a hopeless country, get an education, become a hyphenated American and become president of the World Bank, it's my moral duty to make sure that every single person on the planet has that opportunity.
Jim Yong Kim
#27. In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.
Karl Popper
#28. It is the moral duty of every US voter to guarantee that Barack Hussein Obama is a one-term president.
Michel Templet
#29. I hold it to be the moral duty of women to make themselves beautiful in all lawful ways.
Eliza Lynn Linton
#30. Today, the UK must be the pioneer of a new model of economic change, that integrates social and environmental consideration. This is not just a question of values and moral duty. It is about our economy's capacity to sustain itself
David Miliband
#31. Force is a physical power; I do not see how its effects could produce morality. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#32. Noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#34. The wider our conscience, the wider the impact of our actions, and I do believe someone with more light has the moral duty to enlighten others.
Robin Sacredfire
#35. The other creatures with which we share this world have their rights too, but not speaking our language, they have no voice, no vote; it is our moral duty to take care of them.
Roger Tory Peterson
#36. As a German citizen, as a German professor, and as a political person, I hold it to be not only my right but also my moral duty to take part in the shaping of our German destiny, to expose and oppose obvious wrongs.
Kurt Huber
#37. We educated, privileged lawyers have a professional and moral duty to represent the underrepresented in our society, to ensure that justice exists for all, both legal and economic justice.
Sonia Sotomayor
#38. I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.
William Weld
#39. One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.
Ayn Rand
#40. Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
Immanuel Kant
#41. Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them.
Rosario Ferre
#42. Moses simplifies the whole duty of Israel (and of humanity) by crystalizing the moral law into a single command to love God supremely.
Max Anders
#43. Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
#44. Nature [has] implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.
Thomas Jefferson
#45. The interests of a nation, when well understood, will be found to coincide with their moral duties.
Thomas Jefferson
#46. The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
Ayn Rand
#47. [Women's] duty is nothing else than the fulfilment [sic] of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.
Frances Power Cobbe
#48. And I read the moral
A brave endeavour
To do thy duty, whate'er its worth,
Is better than life with love forever,
And love is the sweetest thing on earth.
James Jeffrey Roche
#49. But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This
Max Weber
#50. There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#51. The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.
David Hume
#52. Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.
Suzanne Fields
#53. Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.
Jane Addams
#54. I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.
Bono
#55. The idea of passing one's whole life in moral idleness, and having one's hardest work and duty done by another-whether God or man-is most revolting to us, as it is most degrading to human dignity.
H. P. Blavatsky
#56. To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.
Samuel Johnson
#57. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.
Theodore Roosevelt
#58. The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
Etty Hillesum
#59. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]
John F. Kennedy
#60. Sometimes you have to risk life, in order to live, and gamble death, to sacrifice life.
Anthony Liccione
#61. It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.
Thomas Paine
#62. I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
Annie Besant
#63. God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.
Chester Nimitz
#64. Moral conduct,or duty,is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action....
G.E. Moore
#65. Responsible: (1) Liable to be held to account for discharging one's duty; (2) Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior; (3) Able to be trusted or depended upon; reliable.
Erika Andersen
#66. If you're going to live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes. Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision of a master fencer, hold your applause and let's get back to last night.
Scott Lynch
#67. My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.
Douglas Adams
#68. Neither god, nor angels, or just men, command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success.
Henry Highland Garnet
#69. It is a friend's duty that he does not leave his friend in a difficult position but provide intimacy and support to him. In difficulty who leaves is a false and the one not quitting is a true friend.
Acharya Mahapragya
#70. Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.
James Q. Wilson
#71. It is not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland. We could not hope to succeed in our effort to make Ireland a Republic without the moral and material support of the liberty-loving citizens of these United States.
Thomas Francis Meagher
#72. There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.
Oriana Fallaci
#73. Unquestionably, it is the duty of every master to watch over the religious and moral culture of his slaves, and to give them every comfort and privilege that is not incompatible with the continued existence of the relations between them.
Roger B. Taney
#74. An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Immanuel Kant
#75. As the light of morning strikes now one peak and then another, some being illuminated while others are in the shadow, so the light of the essential moral principle shines now upon one duty and then upon another, while others are in the shadow.
Felix Adler
#76. Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.
Gao Xingjian
#77. Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.
John Piper
#78. Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.
Frederick C. Beiser
#79. Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#80. At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.
Gary Hamel
#81. We know of officers who develop inappropriate relationships with victims of domestic abuse. They have ignored their professional duty and their moral responsibility.
Theresa May
#82. The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
John Ruskin
#83. It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#84. Abortion raises moral and spiritual questions over which honorable persons can disagree sincerely and profoundly. But those disagreements did not then and do not now relieve us of our duty to apply the Constitution faithfully.
Harry A. Blackmun
#85. But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.
Richard Russo
#86. Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.
Abraham Lincoln
#87. It is a duty incumbent on every true deist, that he vindicates the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible.
Thomas Paine
#88. Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
