I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.
When you work on a text of a lesser quality, as the interpreter or the delivery person, you are obliged to try to fill it out as you see so many people do in lesser work.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense.
Ordinary citizens are obliged and, if need be, compelled by force to meet their commitments. But let higher obligations of an international order be involved, and governments repudiate them, more often than not with a disdainful shrug of the shoulders.
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937.
I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.
The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.
I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all I can.
If I were obliged to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.
A free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve or to let them lapse into destitution.
If you behave normally, people treat you normally. It's only when you act as if you're someone special that they feel obliged to stand on ceremony.
As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
We were totally unprepared for such a large quantity of visitors, and in view of the preservation of the antiquities they being very crowded and in poor preservation, we were obliged to refuse admission until some preparation was made to safeguard the objects.
I'm lucky enough that financially I don't have to feel obliged to go for the bigger stuff. I like the stories and scripts to dictate if I want to do them.
The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
