Quotes About Conscience

Isana laughed. "And you, lady? Are you a woman of conscience or of ambition?" The lady smiled. "That's a question rarely asked here at court." "And why is that?" "Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.

I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.

My understanding of the Electoral College is that they have the right to vote for who they want. So they should vote their conscience, and if their conscience leads them that way, they should follow their conscience.

Each day look into your conscience and amend your faults; if you fail in this duty you will be untrue to the Knowledge and Reason that are within you. Keep a watchful eye over yourself as if you were your own enemy; for you cannot learn to govern yourself, unless you first learn to govern your own passions and obey the dictates of your conscience.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

Pay attention to the voice within. . . . Sometimes the voice of your conscience gets drowned out by crowd noise or by the pep rally of temptations. And your mind may put some selfish spin on the ball, rationalizing that it's okay to veer away from the ethical route. When we run into conflicts between ethical "shoulds" and our selfish "wants," we all argure out ways to con our conscience. But take pains to listen, because it has your best interests at heart.

Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

I lay down the Position, That whatever a Conscience well directed allows us to do for the Advancement of Truth, an erroneous Conscience will warrant for advancing a suppos'd Truth.

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

Conscience is justice's best minister; it threatens, promises, rewards, and punishes and keeps all under control; the busy must attend to its remonstrances, the most powerful submit to its reproof, and the angry endure its upbraidings. While conscience is our friend all is peace; but if once offended farewell the tranquil mind.

The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

By God and upon my conscience, said the devil, I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about. This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian, said Sancho; for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself.

I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the Creator and Father of us all, is the source of them, and also the source of our conscience. I believe that to the degree people live by this inspired conscience, they will grow to fulfill their natures; to the degree that they do not, they will not rise above the animal plane.

The Play's the Thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience

I can't be a part of the problem. I hate the idea of a label just as much as anyone else but I'm with who I'm with, I love who I love and I'm if not a better actress than I was yesterday and my personal life should have no effect on that. I think that the injustice of people staying in the closet is more than I can bear with a clear conscience and I couldn't sleep at night if I was a part of that problem, if I was part of the lies.

Serve God with integrity, and if you achieve no success, at least no sin will lie upon your conscience.

Treat your date with the respect and purity you hope your future spouse will have. Keep in mind how you will expect a young man to treat your daughter one day. By listening to your conscience in this way, you'll have a good idea of where to draw the line.

The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.

A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.

I have thought about this issue of abortion time and again. It is not an easy issue for most people. I came to believe over the years that a woman should be able to make this agonizing decision with her doctor and her family and her conscience, and that we should be very careful that we don't make that decision a crime except in the most extreme circumstances.

Conscience is like a pet: If you spoil it by too much attention it'll start yipping at the most inopportune times.

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience-- yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim-- except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is slicked o'er with the pale cast of thought

All duties are matters of conscience, with this restriction that a superior obligation suspends the force of an inferior one.

There are three things that earthly riches can never do; they can never satisfy divine justice, they can never pacify divine wrath, nor can they every quiet a guilty conscience. And till these things are done man is undone.

The longer men sin, the more easily they can; for every act of transgression weakens conscience, stupefies intellect, hardens hearts, adds force to bad habits, and takes force from good example. And, surely, there is nothing in such associations; as wicked affinities will insure to the sinner in the future state, to incline him to repentance.

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessing and his help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

There is no question of defence. I have always acted in accordance with the dictates of my conscience. I have nothing with which to reproach myself.

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.

Very often people who live in a ghetto accept some of the stigmatisation against them. I mention the case of a Japanese minority the Burakumin, which was pure Japanese in descent, but which was concerned with dirty work: leather work, cadavers, and some other things.There was a famous story of an old man who asked: 'Do you yourself believe you are the same as the Japanese?' And the outsider said: 'I do not know, we are dirty.' This kind of conscience was never there in the surroundings in which I lived. One always felt as someone whom could be proud of, being both German and Jewish.

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

With your whole body, with your whole heart, with your whole conscience, listen to the Revolution....This is the music everyone who has ears should hear.

I don't fear for a physical death, but when my conscience dies, that is a real death

I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more.

Are you angry? Be angry at your sins, beat your soul, afflict your conscience, but strict in judgement and a terrible punisher of your own sins. This is the benefit of anger, wherefore God placed it in us.

Agitation is the marshalling of the conscience of a nation to mold its laws.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

I have made no secret, either privately or publicly, of any sense of outrage over officially enforced military and war service. I regard it as a duty of conscience to fight against such barbarous enslavement of the individual with every means available.

Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.

Nature's hasty conscience.

If you want to succeed in politics you must keep your conscience firmly under control.