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Daily Inspiration Quote by Jose Marti

"It is the duty of man to raise up man"

About this Quote

Austerely simple, Jose Marti's line hits like a moral commandment dressed as common sense. "Duty" is the lever: he isn't offering inspiration, he's imposing an obligation. And the object of that obligation isn't God, the nation, or abstract progress. It's "man" itself. In four words, Marti drags the center of gravity away from empires and toward human dignity, making solidarity not a sentiment but a civic practice.

The phrase "raise up" carries double freight. It's literal uplift - education, material support, political inclusion - and it's a quiet indictment of a society organized to keep people down. Marti wrote as an anti-colonial activist in a 19th-century Cuba shaped by Spanish rule, slavery's afterlife, and the looming influence of the United States. In that context, "raise up man" reads as a rebuke to colonial hierarchies that classify some lives as improvable and others as expendable. He collapses those tiers: your freedom is suspect if it doesn't expand someone else's.

The subtext is also a warning about revolutions that swap flags but keep the same cruelty. Marti's nationalism was never meant to be an excuse for chauvinism; it was meant to be a vehicle for ethical transformation. The repetition of "man" matters here. It suggests a chain reaction: people become fully human by humanizing others. It's not charity. It's construction. A society is built, one raised-up person at a time, by citizens who refuse the comfort of standing above anyone.

Quote Details

TopicServant Leadership
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Marti, Jose. (2026, January 15). It is the duty of man to raise up man. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-the-duty-of-man-to-raise-up-man-152040/

Chicago Style
Marti, Jose. "It is the duty of man to raise up man." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-the-duty-of-man-to-raise-up-man-152040/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It is the duty of man to raise up man." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-the-duty-of-man-to-raise-up-man-152040/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Jose Marti (January 28, 1853 - May 19, 1895) was a Activist from Cuba.

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