Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

The true source of rights is duty.

Obedience to the law is itself a moral duty.

The Church emphasis responsibility more than rights.

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

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.

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.

But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights.

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.

Clergymen do well to preach the neglected doctrine that the first duty of a citizen is to consider what he can do for the state and not what the state will do for him.

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

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.

To a reluctant admission of the necessity for State action, we join a burning belief in duty.

Must we always do our duty? If so, how are we always to know what is our duty?

Duty is what goes most against the grain, because in doing that we do only what we are strictly obliged to, and are seldom much praised for it.

Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.

Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

A man can give up a right, but he may not give up a duty without being guilty of a grave dereliction.

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.

For duty, duty must be done; The rule applies to everyone.

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.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

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.