Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it - it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it - you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

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.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

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 did only what my duty demanded. I could have taken no other course without dishonor.

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

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

If you know something is morally reprehensible, then it is your moral obligation to stop it as soon as possible.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

A conscientious man ought not to regard what may happen to him in this world.

Nothing deters a good man from what honor requires of him

An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.

The true source of rights is duty.

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.

Duty does not consist in suffering everything, but in suffering everything for duty. Sometimes, indeed, it is our duty not to suffer.

Nothing is properly one's duty but what is also one's interest.

Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance.

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.

Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.

My obligation is to do the right thing. The rest is in God's hands.

If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.

What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature