Quotes About Conscience

Business owners should not have to choose between violating their faith and violating the law.

It is never right to do wrong in order to get a chance to do right.

Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.

The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer.

To say Washington was a Deist—even a "soft Deist"—would imply that he did not have a problem violating his conscience each time he worshiped in his church. It is difficult to imagine how Washington, with his expressed concern for his character and his open commitment to honesty and candor, along with his sensitive conscience, could repeatedly and consistently make a public reaffirmation of a faith that he really did not believe.

Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

There is no such thing as an involuntary sin.

In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away.

Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls. We call that prophet conscience. (St. Thomas used two terms for it: "synderesis" was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and "conscience" was the application of it. We use "conscience" for both.) Conscience is essentially the power of reason to know good and evil.

Banks wondered if that was a psychopath's trait, along the lines of lack of conscience, no sense of humor and zero human empathy.

The law dictates how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions, limits their ability to make money on the side, and requires the disclosure of those contributors. Hopefully, politicians are also limited to some extent by their conscience. A sense of decency and good judgment ought to prevent politicians on both sides of the aisle from engaging in certain transactions—even if they think they can get away with it.

Those who lie and cheat, but do not believe what they are doing to be wrong, may be living according to ethical standards. They may believe, for any of a number of possible reasons, that it is right to lie, cheat, steal and so on. They are not living according to conventional ethical standards, but they may be living according to some other ethical standards.

Just as a rat can be conditioned to press a lever in return for a reward of food, so a human being can be conditioned by professional rewards to ignore the ethical issues raised by animal experiments.

That little whisper—"You deserve it"—comes, I believe, from the worst part of our sinful natures, the part that always wants another cookie, a bigger house, a nicer TV. I'm pretty sure it's the same voice that told Hitler he "deserved" Poland.

The testimony of a clear conscience before God is the priceless and unassailable bulwark of the soul.

Guilt—if there was any guilt—spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything…. Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.

The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he

Always this barrier, this impossibility of getting through. This time he did not waste his time trying; he simply went on stroking her, thinking, It'll be on my conscience, whatever happens to her. And she knows it, too. So she's absolved of the burden of responsibility, and that, for her, is the worst thing possible. Too bad, he thought, I wasn't able to make love to her.

There is evil in the best of us, of course; but perhaps just a little bit more in the worst of us.

How can knowing something be sinful?

Anyone who doesn't laugh has something on their conscience, you can be sure of that. - from: 'The Twelve Brothers