Quotes About Conscience

If you compromise with your own conscience, you will weaken your conscience. Soon your conscience will fail to guide you and you never will have real wealth based on peace of mind.

What distinguishes us humans from animals is our conscience. Once our conscience is gone we lose our humanness. Without conscience, humans can be far more dangerous than beasts. Beasts kill for food, humans kill for ideology. Beasts kill just enough to eat. Humans can kill endlessly.

Remember, character is not of much value. What is valuable is consciousness - not conscience but consciousness. Conscience is created by the society. The more foolish you are, the more the society is able to create a conscience in you. It gives you an idea how to live your life. It manipulates you in a very subtle way. It hypnotizes you and conditions you. And the conditioning is so long that you forget completely that these are not your ideas.

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.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

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.

Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.

[On disagreeing with her husband about his slave-holding:] I cannot give my conscience into the keeping of another human being or submit the actions dictated by my conscience to their will.

Children of God should not make a general confession by acknowledging their innumerable sins in a vague manner, because such confession does not provide conscience opportunity to do its perfect work. They ought to allow the Holy Spirit through their conscience to point out their sins one by one. Christians must accept its reproach and be willing, according to the mind of the Spirit, to eliminate everything which is contrary to God.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart, or pierces the conscience but what comes from a living conscience

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.

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

A brave man hazards life, but not his conscience.

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.

A leader is useless when he acts against the promptings of his own conscience.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom.

But will this attention to poverty be sustained or transient? That depends on our leaders - whether we step up and sustain our moral commitment as the country's conscience would naturally want us to do.

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending.

The liberty of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious.

It's true that in a lot of western feminist movements, you see women working singularly from men. Suffragettes and the women's rights movement in the 60s here, but when I think of the Islamic feminist movement, I think of a lot of men who are very much standing with the women. It really feels like in equal numbers. Women are catching up in the field because we were not given access to knowledge and encouraged into these studies and so these men are helping us and empowering us. They are men of conscience who are fed up with this assumption that they're entitled.

They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.

Philanthropist, n.: A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

Trust and confidence in Christ and a ready reliance on His merits, mercy, and grace lead to hope, through His Atonement, in the Resurrection and eternal life. Such faith and hope invite into our lives the sweet peace of conscience for which we all yearn.

Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

The ultimate test of a man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.

That image or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely Divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.

I didn't see my character, Core, as a cannibal but as somebody who is extremely passionate and who doesn't have any conscience. She takes her passion to its complete extreme.

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.

All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive.

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.

Now for my own case, I bless the Lord that, for all that hath been said of me, my conscience doth not condemn me. I do not say I am free of sin, but I am at peace with God through a slain Mediator; and I believe that there is no salvation but only in Christ.

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.

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

State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.

I seek no better warrant than my own, conscience.

If I get an order to evacuate a Jew from his home, to expel him, me, personally, my conscience would not let me do it. I'll ask my commander to excuse me, but I won't publicly call on others to refuse an order. I personally can't.

Conscience is called the adversary, because it always opposes our evil will; it reminds us of what we ought to do but do not, and condemns us if we do something we ought not.

We, as human beings, should wish to be loved and embraced for our character, respected and relied on for our courage, and trusted for our conscience.

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

Oh but I'd pay anything to keep my conscience clean.I'm keeping my eyes on the the exit sign. Steady now.

The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order to break rules and defy authority. . . . She rids herself of the "oughts" and "musts" that convert every minor infraction into a sin of omission or commission. It certainly does not occur to her or to her family that by questioning the moral standards she erected as a child she is taking the first steps in her journey toward a firmer, more reasonable, less harsh, more ethical form of conscience.

Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.

In the end, it is conscience that will have the last word, stronger than all strategies, all ideologies and also all religions.... Peace is still possible.

When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil.