Quotes About Conscience

Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Ä°nsan, ÅŸeytan?n yan?na yaklaÅŸmas?na izin verdi mi, art?k iradesi üzerindeki denetimini kaybeder. Gözleri kapan?r; iyiyle kötüyü, doÄŸruyla yanl??? ay?ramaz olur.

When we stop blaming the darkness, or ourselves, for having been walking in it, and decide, instead, to thank the Light for showing us the truth of our actual estate... then we turn the corner in our work to awaken conscience.

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

A consciência é uma voz interior que nos adverte de que alguém pode estar olhando

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of 'good society' as he knew it... His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which 'good society' everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to 'close his ears to the voice of conscience,' as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a 'respectable voice,' with the voice of respectable society around him.

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

Hannah Arendt

This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left.

He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him.

At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Who was he to judge? Who was he "to have [his] own thoughts in this matter"? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution. He did

Hannah Arendt