Obligation Quotes - Page 21

• A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.

  Richard Lamm

  Firsts, Poor, Workers

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• In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Marriage, Girl, Husband

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II. Book Three, Chapter X, 1840.

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• There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

  Athol Fugard

  Artist, Trying, Moral

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• The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Lying, Essence

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• Benefits received are a delight to us as long as we think we can requite them; when that possibility is far exceeded, they are repaid with hatred instead of gratitude.

  Tacitus

  Gratitude, Thinking, Long

  Tacitus (2007). “The Annals & The Histories”, p.132, Modern Library

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• What higher obligation does a President have than to explain his intentions to the people and persuade them that the direction he wishes to go is right?

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  People, Wish, President

  "A Clinton Report Card, So Far" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., www.nytimes.com. April 11, 1993.

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• The sense of obligation to continue is present in all of us. A duty to strive is the duty of us all. I felt a call to that duty.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Strive, Duty, Felt

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• You convey too great a compliment when you say that I have earned the right to the presidential nomination. No man can establish such an obligation upon any part of the American people. My country owes me no debt. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor. In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope. My whole life has taught me what America means. I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.

  Herbert Hoover

  Girl, Country, Mean

  Herbert Hoover (1929). “The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover, 1928”, p.3, Stanford University Press

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• You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Important, Paper

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.837, Simon and Schuster

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• We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges - is in our own self-interest. That's where the pool of talent is - and also of fans.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Baseball, Home, College

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• What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.

  Edmund Burke

  Real, Mean, Men

  Edmund Burke (1912). “Reflections on the French Revolution”, p.192, CUP Archive

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• Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

  George Meredith

  Duty, Felicity, Possession

  'The Egoist' (1879) ch. 14

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• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Fall, Reading, Writing

  "Less Than One: Selected Essays".

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• Nobody is bound by any obligation unless it has first been freely accepted.

  Ugo Betti

  Firsts, Accepted, Duty

  Ugo Betti (1964). “Three plays on justice: Landslide. Struggle till dawn. The fugitive”

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• Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Thinking, Interesting

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• I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

  Anne Lamott

  Believe, Parent, Trying

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• Wherefore for the public interest and benefit of human society it is requisite that the highest obligations possible should be laid upon the consciences of men.

  Isaac Barrow

  Men, Benefits, Should

  Isaac Barrow (1818). “The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow”, p.45

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• Men will believe anything at all provided they are under no obligation to believe it.

  Thomas Gray

  Believe, Men, Belief

  Thomas Gray (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas Gray (Illustrated)”, p.304, Delphi Classics

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• Just as a person is commanded to honor and revere his father, so he is under an obligation to honor and revere his teacher, even to a greater extent than his father; for his father gave him life in this world, while his teacher instructs him in wisdom, secures for him life in the world to come.

  Maimonides

  Teacher, Father, Teaching

  Moses Maimonides, Isadore Twersky (1972). “A Maimonides Reader”, p.69, Behrman House, Inc

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• There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Nature, Kindness, Animal

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• There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.

  Aldo Leopold

  Girl, Growing Up, Animal

  Aldo Leopold (1992). “The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays by Aldo Leopold”, p.182, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.

  Vaclav Havel

  Government, Law, Moral

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• Claims of right and insistence upon obligations may depend upon treaty stipulations, or upon the rules of international law, or upon the sense of natural justice applied to the circumstances of a particular case, or upon disputed facts.

  Elihu Root

  Law, Natural Justice, May

  Elihu Root (1916). “Addresses on International Subjects”

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• Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

  Simon Wiesenthal

  Forever, Survival, Asking

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• I still don't have a publicist. If I'm in a film, you have an obligation to promote it, I'll do as much as I can.

  Gary Oldman

  Film, Stills, Publicists

  "Gary Oldman: 'My sister in EastEnders is more famous than me'" by Kate Goodacre, www.digitalspy.com. September 2, 2011.

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