Service Quotes


 

Training Modules 

 

NC Social Studies Standard Course of Study 

 

 

     Quotes are great instructional tools for introducing or summarizing a social studies lesson.  Use the following quotes that call for service as a means for your students to support the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and to critically reflect on the benefits of service, their initiation of a service learning experience, as well as, the need for sustained implementation of their service learning project.  Use the following essential questions to guide your student's thoughts:

 

     Essential Questions:


 

"Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. At this moment of great challenge and great change, renewing the promise of America begins with renewing the idea that in America, we rise or fall as one nation and one people."

                                                             President-Elect Barack Obama, Election Night, November 4, 2008

 

“The great aim and end of all learning is service.”

                                                              Ben Franklin

  

“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

                                                            Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct”

                                                            Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, February 4, 1968

  

 

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

 

Robert F. Kennedy

“Day of Affirmation Address” University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966

 

  

“Take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them."

                                                             Bill Gates, Harvard University, June 2007

 

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” 

                                                             Horance Mann, to the graduating class, 1859, Antioch Univeristy  

 

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." 

                                                             Mahatma Gandhi

 

"I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."

                                                             Mahatma Gandhi

  

"We make a living by what we do, but we make a life by what we give."

                                                             Winston Churchill

 

"The moral test of a society is how that society treats those who are in the dawn of life. the children; those who are in the twilight of life. the elderly; and those who are in the shadow of life. the sick, the needy and the handicapped."

                                                              Hubert Humphrey

 

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.   Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on the future generations."

 

                                                              George Bernard Shaw

 

"Service to others is the payment you make for your space here on earth."

                                                              Mohammed Ali

 

"One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something."

                                                              Henry David Thoreau 

 

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"

                                                              Eleanor Roosevelt

  

"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. We must find each other."

                                                            Mother Theresa

 

My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned, not bought.

 

                                                           Margaret Chase Smith 

 

 

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

                                                           Albert Schweitzer

  

 

  Citizen service is the very American idea that we meet our challenges not as isolated individuals but as members of a true community, with all of us working together. Our mission is nothing less than to spark a renewed sense of obligation, a new sense of duty, a new season of service.

     Though government has an important role to play in meeting the many challenges that remain before us, we are coming to understand that no organization, including government, will fully succeed without the active participation of each of us. Volunteers are vital to enabling this country to live up to the true promise of its heritage.

                                                            Bill Clinton