This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
While still unable to do your duty to the living, how can you do your duty to the dead?... Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?
Death | Duty | Life | Life | Understanding | Understand |
To let oneself be bound by a duty from the moment you see it approaching is part of the integrity that alone justifies responsibility.
Duty | Integrity | Responsibility |
Duty is subdivided into two parts: the common duty of every man, as a man or member of a state; the other, the respective or special duty of every man, in his profession, vocation, and place.
This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing.
Body | Children | Duty | Education | Good | Love | Men | Torture | Wise | World |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In duty the individual finds his liberation; liberation from independence on mere natural impulse.
Duty | Impulse | Individual |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education.
Duty | Education | Fear | Good | Justice | Man | Means | Men | Method | Model | Order | Reason | Sense | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Wise |
The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, the last duty well done.
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
Duty | Government | Individual | People | Power | Right | Time | Government |
To persevere in one's duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.
Duty | Experience | Vision |
Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
If we attend to the experience of men’s conduct, we meet frequent and, as we ourselves allow, just complaints that one cannot find a single certain example of the disposition to act from pure duty. Although many things are done in conformity with what duty prescribes, it is nevertheless always doubtful whether they are done strictly from duty, so as to have moral worth.
Conduct | Conformity | Duty | Example | Experience | Men | Worth |