Alice Miller Quotes

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom

Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.

Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring and reprove.

What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty.

It is the responsibility of every human to know their actions and the consequences of their actions and to ask questions and to question things when they are wrong.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Not to discontinue our allegiance, in this case, would be to join with the sovereign in promoting the slavery and misery of that society, the welfare of which, we ourselves, as well as our sovereign, are indispensably obliged to secure and promote, as far as in us lies.

Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

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.

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

None can judge with certainty who is right and who is wrong, who is nearest the truth, or which is the best way to achieve the greatest good for each and everyone. Freedom coupled with experience, is the only way of discovering the truth and what is best …

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

Right therefore and obligation are, as logicians express it, correllative terms; one of these ideas necessarily supposes the other; and we cannot conceive a right without a corresponding obligation.

A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power

I don't have to justify my behaviour.

Agency, or the power to choose, was ours as spirit children of our Creator before the world was. It is a gift from God, nearly as precious as life itself. Often, however, agency is misunderstood. While we are free to choose, once we have made those choices, we are tied to the consequence of those choices. We are free to take drugs or not. But once we choose to use a habit-forming drug, we are bound to the consequences of that choice. Addiction surrenders later freedom to choose.