Quotes About Conscience

I have a lot of trouble understanding all the detail of finance and administration - but if you combine intellectual and professional capacity with a social conscience, you can change things: countries, structures, economic models, colonial states.

There's not a Christian out there who hasn't struggled with wanting to break a rule or having broken a rule over and over again.

What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later.

Just as I would not abide by a resolution ordering me to kill Salvadorans. I also cannot abide by a resolution that orders me to let them die.

I've been arrested three times. I don't like getting arrested, but it's not so bad when it's an organized form of nonviolent disobedience. It's something appealing to a higher law.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

Even in this glowering age, morality animates our lives with meaning.

Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.

To endeavor to domineer over conscience, is to invade the citadel of heaven.

As Members of Congress and people of conscience, we must work to overcome the indifference and distortions of history, and ensure that future generations know what happened.

As I heard out people who had done others wrong, I'd often wonder how a human allows his or her better judgement to override their conscience. When I share these feelings with my friends, they say, 'Everyone isn't like you.' But I think it's easy to assert your better feelings and not allow the darker side to dominate your personality.

The question should never be, 'Can I shoot him?' The question should always be, 'Do I have to shoot him?

Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.

To live in accordance with nature, therefore, was to live in accordance with God. Male or female, Greek or barbarian, free or slave, all were equally endowed with the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Syneidesis, the Stoics termed this spark of the divine within every mortal: 'conscience'. 'Alone of all creatures alive and treading the earth, it is we who bear a likeness to a god.'48

The conscientious arsonist doesn't just set the building on fire; first he fills the fire extinguishers with petrol.

Evil, as considered in these cases, is a lack of choice.

But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.

The world was slipping down into Hell, and everyone was helping it on its way. Everyone accepted a little bit of money, and a little bit of blame, and that way they could all walk around with a conscience that was just a little bit off-color. Just a little bit, but add all those bits together ...

If what you're sowing isn't evil, you should have nothing to fear.

What is right and what is wrong is a very sensitive matter.

I remember the dog at home, when I was a girl; the one that killed chickens. They tied a dead hen around his neck and he carried it around with him all day until he just lay there unmoving with his eyes shut in a morass of shame. It was cruel. There's nothing so hideously easy as giving someone a bad conscience.

Oh, Anna Aemelin, the only thing you care about is your own conscience. That's what you cherish. You're a charming little liar.