70 Civic Duty Quotes

Following is our list of civic duty quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about civic virtue.

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Famous Civic Duty Quotes

Voting is a civic sacrament. — Theodore Hesburgh

Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen. — John F. Kennedy

Civic education and civic responsibility should be taught in elementary school. — Donna Brazile

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty. - Norman Douglas

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty. — Norman Douglas

It is the essence of responsibility to put the public good ahead of personal gain — Robert Kennedy

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Good citizenship and defending democracy means living up to the ideals and values that make this country great. — Ronald Reagan

The duty of loyalty and gratitude to a homeland that provides decent and happy life for all of its citizens and residents requires that we all deeply engrave it in our hearts at all times. — Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate. — Clay Shirky

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires active participation from all citizens. — Alexei Navalny

Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong. — Charles Handy

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness. — Mahatma Gandhi

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. - Gunter Grass

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. — Gunter Grass

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty. — John D. Rockefeller

Civic Responsibility Quotes

By its very definition, civic responsibility means taking a healthy role in the life of one's community. That means that classroom lessons should be complemented by work outside the classroom. Service-learning does just that, tying community service to academic learning. — John Glenn

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough

In an era when careerism dominates the campus, is it too much to expect students to go beyond their private interests, learn about the world around them, develop a sense of civic and social responsibility, and discover how they can contribute to the common good? — Ernest L. Boyer

Civic duty quote Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself.
Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself.

There is a Party of fiscal responsibility... economic responsibility... social responsibility... civic responsibility... personal responsibility... and moral responsibility. That party is the Democratic Party. — Howard Dean

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex. — Valerie Solanas

Media corporations have a civic responsibility not only to prevent fraud and financial abuse, but also to not corrupt or degrade our culture. — Charles W. Pickering

Civic duty quote The government's first duty is to protect the people.
The government's first duty is to protect the people.

Anyway, it's not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty. — Edward Snowden

perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out. — Roger Ebert

There is a different spelling between "rights" and "rites" - in other words, civic legislators and ecclesiastical councils have different responsibilities. — Otis Moss III

Civic Virtue Quotes

To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do. — John Adams

A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue. — Phillip E. Johnson

The propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained... — George Washington

Civic duty quote The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from government.
The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from government.

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. — Daniel Berrigan

Thus we can see that – at least at the level of economics – democracy is a sort of slow-motion suicide, in which you are told that it is the highest civic virtue to approve of those who want to rob you. — Stefan Molyneux

Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today. — William Damon

Civic duty quote The duty of a true Patriot is to protect his country from its government.
The duty of a true Patriot is to protect his country from its government.

Those who enjoy the blessings of liberty under a divinely inspired constitution should promote morality, and they should practice what the Founding Fathers called civic virtue. — Dallin H. Oaks

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness. — George Washington

It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity. — Benito Mussolini

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. — Mary McCarthy

Responsible Citizen Quotes

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. — Benjamin Franklin

You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours. — August Wilson

The power to arrest - to deprive a citizen of liberty - must be used fairly, responsibly, and without bias. — Loretta Lynch

Civic duty quote It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.
It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens. — Charles Derber

Cleaning up the country cannot be the sole responsibility of sweepers. Do citizens have no role in this? We have to change this mindset. — Narendra Modi

I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision. — Daniel Ellsberg

Civic duty quote Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

We all have an obligation as citizens of this earth to leave the world a healthier, cleaner, and better place for our children and future generations. — Blythe Danner

We have a responsibility as a state to protect our most vulnerable citizens: our children, seniors, people with disabilities. That is our moral obligation. But there is an economic justification too - we all pay when the basic needs of our citizens are unmet. — John Lynch

Ants are good citizens: they place group interests first. — Clarence Day

To be a mother is a woman's greatest vocation in life. She is a partner with God. No being has a position of such power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her comes the responsibility and opportunity of molding the nation's citizens. — Spencer W. Kimball

People Writing About Civic Duty

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Read quotes by Theodore Hesburgh

Theodore Hesburgh
quotes on education, leadership and life

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Read quotes by John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy
quotes on democracy, leadership and change

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Read quotes by Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile
quotes on leadership, education and love

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Read quotes by Norman Douglas

Norman Douglas
quotes on leadership, education and world

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Read quotes by Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy
quotes on civil rights, gdp

235 2744
Read quotes by Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes
quotes on education, slavery and government

111 578

More Civic Duty Quotes

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. — Oriana Fallaci

Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them. — Rosario Ferre

People aren't as stupid as the politicians think. More and more of us are laughing off our 'civic duty' to vote, rejecting the role of compulsory constituent. — Bob Black

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings. — Daniel Libeskind

The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies is now all the government does. — Tom G. Palmer

The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. — Theodore Roosevelt

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money. — Alain de Botton

Citizens ... should be practitioners of civic virtue in their conduct toward government. They should be ever willing to fulfill the duties of citizenship. This includes compulsory duties like military service and the numerous voluntary actions they must take if they are to preserve the principle of limited government through citizen self-reliance. — Dallin H. Oaks

Democratic dissent is not disloyalty, it is a positive civic duty. — Shami Chakrabarti

A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties. — Ludwig von Mises

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world. — Tim Heidecker

Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty. — Colin Powell

There is all the difference in the world between the nonviolence that the ordinary Christian should embrace and the duty of civic authorities to police their communities. The end of Romans 12 is quite clear about the first; the start of Romans 13 is quite clear about the second. — N. T. Wright

I believe Britishness is defined not on ethnic and exclusive grounds but through shared values, our history of tolerance, openness and internationalism and our commitment to democracy and liberty, to civic duty and the public space. — David Blunkett

Smuggle out the truth, pass it through all the obstacles that its enemies fabricate; multiply, spread by all means possible her message so that she may triumph; through zeal and civic action counterbalance the influence of money and the machinations lavished on the propagation of deception. That, in my opinion, is the most useful activity and the most sacred duty of pure patriotism. — Maximilien Robespierre

The kinds of people we need in government are precisely the kinds of people who are most reluctant to go into government -- people who understand the inherent dangers of power and feel a distaste for using it, but who may do so for a few years as a civic duty. The worst kind of people to have in government are those who see it as a golden opportunity to impose their own superior wisdom and virtue on others. — Thomas Sowell

I'd hate to imply that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but guess what it is. — Ty Burr

We can find common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is. Our belief in tolerance and liberty which shines through British history. Our commitment to fairness, fair play and civic duty. — Gordon Brown

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