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Quotations about duty | |
Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter. There is the great ancestral duty, the essential duty, stronger than death, which not even man's will and anger are able to check. How can we learn to know ourselves? By reflection, never, but by our actions. Attempt to do your duty, and you will immediately find what is in you. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour." It is the duty of a man of honor to teach others the good which he has not been able to do himself because of the malignity of the times, that this good finally can be done by another more loved in heaven. The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.This does not mean that you are war mongers.On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous perforrnance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out. |
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