Quotes About Conscience

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

just because you know right from wrong, it doesn't mean you stay away from the wrong part.

institutional self-reform is rare; the conscience is willing, but the culture is rough.

Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

My conscience commands me to love an enemy and not harm him, to avoid adding new causes for separation; it tells me that I ought to be an example of moderation and mildness for my enemy; perhaps through my actions, I might encourage him to do the same, and then at last may God send us the dear desired peace."8 For

John Whipple did not allow his anger at such treatment to obscure his judgment. In years of trading around the Pacific he had often met obstinate men and the cruel situations which they produce, and he had learned that in such confrontations his only chance of winning lay in doing exactly what in conscience ought to be done. It was by reliance upon this conviction that he had quietly made his way in such disparate jungles as Valparaiso, Batavia, Singapore and Honolulu.

Exert yourself ceaselessly in decreasing evil and accumulating good.

Therefore, pursue your course bravely. Your conscience is at least your own, and to follow it is to be a man; to follow the conscience of another is to be a slave.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.

anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse that the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impasssable with our bodies the corridor the the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

He had power over her not because she was free but because she was guilty. To enforce his power over her he had only to keep her guilt awake.

Yesterday, because of Mrs. Struan's letter to him, he had been confronted with an immortal truth: however loyal you are to a company, however much service you give "the company," the company can and will spit you out at its whim, without conscience.

Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience.

You'd be better served taxing your conscience for those who deserve your regret.

It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

We did what people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

President Reagan likes to say Uncle Sam is a kindly old man with a spine of steel, and that he is. But I want to see Uncle Sam as well with a mind and with a heart and with a soul and a conscience.

We should not underestimate the ability of people to do wrong if they want to do so.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.