Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.

He has the obligation to society that any human being has. I don't think a satirist has any greater obligation to society than a bricklayer or anybody else.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

A decent society is not based on rights. It is based on duty. Our duty to one another. To all should be given opportunity; from all responsibility demanded.

The more the power of men and women increases, the greater is their responsibility as individuals and as members of the community.

If you accept the privilege of public service, you had better understand the responsibilities of public service.

Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them

When approached right, citizens never fail to shoulder their responsibilities.

Liberty is a duty, not a right.

We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise.

Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

I know the biggest crime is just to throw up your hands, Say, This has nothing to do with me, I just want to live as comfortably as I can...

... education fails in so far as it does not stir in students a sharp awareness of their obligations to society and furnish at least a few guideposts pointing toward the implementation of these obligations.

To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity.

The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.

Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive.

If this day means anything, it means that you are now in the contingent of the responsible. You must be kind, yes, but you must also look beyond your own house. We're depending on you for your efforts and your vision. We are depending on your eye and your imagination to identify what wrongs exist and persist, and on your hands, your backs, your efforts, to right them.

Any Christian constitutionalist who retreats from this battle jeopardizes his life here and hereafter. Seldom has so much responsibility hung on so few, so heavily; but our numbers are increasing, and we who have been warned have a responsibility to warn our neighbor.

I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.

The moral difference between a soldier and a civilian is that the soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member. The civilian does not.

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.

We, as humans, have actually developed a sense of social responsibility. We have gone beyond our basic instincts.

No phase of life, whether public or private, can be free from duty.