To protect those who are not able to protect themselves is a duty which every one owes to society.

"If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, "Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.

Every man that is injured ought to have his recompence.

The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.

Human minds always are logical; the fallacy always is in the premise, the basic unquestioned assumption, upon which the process of reasoning is based. So in logical return for The Government’s benefits, we are supposed to ‘owe a duty’ to It. The custom of taxation is a remnant of the Incarnate God’s ownership of ‘his people.’ Why do you owe money to Mr. Kennedy? If you need to guard your property, you hire and pay guards, nightwatchmen; if you are a banker you buy and pay for armored cars and hire guards to transport the bank’s gold; if you manage an insurance company you hire and pay detectives to investigate claims against your company. If a foreign power attacks your country, you defend it; you man the tanks, fly the bombers, fire the guns. Is there a need, in reason, to compel persons—by force—to defend their property and themselves? Is there a reason why ‘people cannot do for themselves’ in a free market, everything that The Government is supposed to be doing for them?

It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].

The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.

The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.

You must remember," the doctor said, "Society must be protected against the individual."
"Yes," Feerman said drowsily, "but who is to protect the individual against society?

Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.

It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.

You of all people should know that everything in this world must be paid for, whether in gold, time, or blood.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for.