Quotes About Conscience

What a swarm of the pseudo-"delivered" stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear—do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle.

Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?

no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

To be a Raskolnikov — without the excuse of murder.

I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called "salvation" and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven. And that other rape, psychological analysis

Some consciences are fitted with automatic answering machine that work very well. But I never got the technology under control

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

A person will be considered dead if his conscience has died and cannot demand his basic rights.

At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.

Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of one woman only!

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

Everyone in the world is guilty of something.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

And sometimes when you're very mixed-up inside, you do things you know you shouldn't do.

Belinda decided that she could miss doing her room with a clear conscience, as there were so many more important things to be done. It was unlikely that Miss Liversedge would be visiting them and putting them to shame by writing 'E. Liversedge' with her finger, as she had once done when Emily had neglected to dust the piano.

I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.

Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.