Quotes About Conscience

True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

An overblown conscience is an empty conscience.

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience. Nonviolent actions does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences. Nor does it have to petition those in power to do something about a situation. It can face the authorities with a new fact and say: Accept this new situation which we have created.

My aim is to lay bare and proclaim the crying and horrible guilt of the bloody doctrine of persecution as one of the most seditious, destructive, blasphemous, and bloodiest in any or all the nations of the world, notwithstanding the many fine veils, pretenses, and colors of not persecuting Christ Jesus, but heretics; not God's truth or servants, but blasphemers and seducers; not persecuting men for their conscience, but for sinning against their conscience; and like specious reasonings to justify the cruelty of intolerance.

Compulsion in the literal Sense is maliciously misrepresented, by supposing it authorizes Violences committed against the Truth. The Answer to this; by which it is prov'd, that the literal Sense does in reality authorize the stirring up Persecutions against the Cause of Truth, and that an erroneous Conscience has the same Rights as an enlighten'd Conscience.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.

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

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life.

The truly great consider, first, how they may gain the approbation of God, and, secondly, that of their own conscience. Having done this, they would then willingly conciliate the good opinion of their fellow-men. But the truly little reverse the thing. The primary object with them is to secure the applause of their fellow-men; and having effected this, the approbation of God and their own conscience may follow on as they can.

Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

When I speak of divisions greater than gender or race, I say that because it is so unimaginable. I can imagine what it would be like to be another race. Or to be a man - I could draw that up in my mind and experience it. Schizophrenia? We're all schizophrenic in our dreams. Depression? Most of us have been at least a little depressed and can imagine it. But not having a conscience? Conscience is so profound and so basic in most of us.

It is our imagination, not our conscience, which makes us better than the beasts of the field.

I do not want any patronage, as I do not give any. I am a lover of my own liberty, and so I would do nothing to restrict yours. I simply want to please my own conscience which is God.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire.

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history.

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.

What a man calls his 'conscience' is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

Conscience is the pulse of reason

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

I have a different idea of elegance. I don't dress like a fop, it's true, but my moral grooming is impeccable. I never appear in public with a soiled conscience, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven't washed away. I'm always immaculately clean, adorned with independence and frankness. I may not cut a stylish figure, but I hold my soul erect. I wear my deeds as ribbons, my wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.

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

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

Conscience is that candle of the Lord which was not quite put out.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Self-approbation, when founded in truth and a good conscience, is a source of some of the purest joys known to man.

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

And these [pharmaceutical] companies are still threatening to sue. And it's like, you know, do you not have a conscience? Do you not want the world to be a better place? You're still making a profit. How much more of a profit do you want to make?

I am the conscience of the 21st Century.

If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience.

And so the blasts of calumny, howl they ever so fiercely over the good man's head, contribute to his juster appreciation and to his wider fame. Preserve only a good conscience toward God, and a loving purpose toward your fellow men, and you need not wince nor tremble, though the pack of the spaniel-hearted hounds snarl at your heels.

When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.

Virtuosi have been long remarked to have little conscience in their favorite pursuits. A man will steal a rarity who would cut off his hand rather than take the money it is worth. Yet, in fact, the crime is the same.

Whoever attempts to suppress liberty of conscience finishes some day by wishing for the Inquisition.

I think setting goals is critical; having deadlines for ourselves- how much by when? Too many people have these big dreams where they want to have a big house on the ocean. But until we say what ocean, how big, what day, our conscience doesn't know what to do with that information. A positive expectancy, a positive attitude, a belief that your dream is possible is also helpful.

Once you make up your mind never to stand waiting and hesitating when your conscience tells you what you ought to do, and you have got the key to every blessing that a sinner can reasonably hope for.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them; not only because these never leave a Man, not even in the extremest Old Age; but because a Conscience bearing Witness that our Life was well-spent, together with the Remembrance of past good Actions, yields an unspeakable Comfort to the Soul

The end of education is to see men made whole, both in competence and in conscience.

A disciplined conscience is a man's best friend. It may not be his most amiable, but it is his most faithful monitor.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

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

We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is- our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations and we accept compromise only in the light of our conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.