Human Obligation Quotes

When God put everybody here, I don't think that he had a master plan of a pecking order. That's not what you see in the Bible. I disagree with that notion, so in my estimation, we've all been put on this planet to share it. It is our duty and our obligation and our responsibility to make sure that we've done so in the proper fashion.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

It seems to me that it's every man's obligation to make what contribution he can. You live each day as best you can. That, to me, is what makes life interesting.

I... [am] convinced [man] has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits - they may still be very distant - God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Service to society is the rent we pay for living on this planet.

We are God's creation, and we have a responsibility to keep ourselves at our best.

I was told by my grandfather who was a minister that we all were put here on earth to be of service to one another, and it is quite gratifying to know that if I am able to be of help to one that is not able to help themselves then I am fulfilling my obligation as a human being.

I don't know if God exists and I don't care. God's will and design for this temporal and spatial vastness, if any, is so patently, deliberately impenetrable that I doubt any mortal has a grasp on it. The very inexplicability of sad events like the tsunami, like the AIDS crisis or even like the cancer death of the father of one of my daughter's 2nd-grade classmates last week are, to me, reminders to focus on our obligations to one another, not to the infinite; to honor the creator, if any, by honoring creation itself and hoping that's good enough.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.

Man owes two solemn debts--one to society, and one to-nature. It is only when he pays the second that he covers the first.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.