Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS.

We have a greater responsibility to act than those who live in ignorance. Once you become knowledgeable, you have an obligation to do something about it.

I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but I don't have to go out of my way to do that.

Life is moral responsibility.

When you have a voice and a platform and you know better, it becomes your moral obligation to support that community. And by extension, you're supporting your family.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.

Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.

I learned from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.

I felt I had a responsibility to do the right thing. And then I wanted to do the right thing by my family and there was no handbook.

By definition, the big difference between mercy and justice is that mercy is never ever obligatory.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.

It is wicked to withdraw from being useful to the needy, and cowardly to give way to the worthless.

We are obligated to be more scrupulous in fulfilling the commandment of charity than any other positive commandment because charity is the sign of a righteous man.

Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.

We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.

... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper.

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.

We become responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong and fail to remind them of what is right.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.