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What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.
Hannah ArendtBut that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.
Mark TwainWe may gamble on outsmarting the law; we may even gamble on the leniency of man and the mercy of God-but no man ever won a gamble with his own conscience. Even should he think he has beaten his conscience into submission, his misdeeds still leave their mark upon him. Anyone who gambles against this fact has already lost his gamble.
Sidney GreenbergYour mind is reason, your heart is your conscience, and in your heart - you will find truth. This is why Truth is always recognized first by the heart. Our minds are simply there to reason with our conscience. The only thinking that matters is that which passes through the heart. Your heart is what connects you to the light of God. He who acts through his heart, truly stands by God.
Suzy KassemYou 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.
Philip RothIf your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.
Martin Luther King, Jr.It is quite certain that, if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."
John Campbell ShairpTolstoy 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.
Randy AlcornI cannot choose but adhere to the word of God, which has possession of my conscience; nor can I possibly, nor will I even make any recantation, since it is neither safe nor honest to act contrary to conscience! Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God! Amen.
Martin LutherThe students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.
Jeff LindsayThere is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscienceโฆThese testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail. โOn Repentance
Michel de MontaigneA good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.
Seneca the YoungerConscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.
Jean-Jacques RousseauI 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.
Stephen CoveyLike a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured.
Martin Luther King, Jr.First, there must be talent. . .Then there must be discipline. . .Then there must be. . .and absolute conscience. . .to prevent faking.
Ernest HemingwayHe had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.
Anais NinWere 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.
Irvin D. YalomThe 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
Bill MoyersThe opponent strikes you on your cheek, and you strike him on the heart by your amazing spiritual audacity in turning the other cheek. You wrest the offensive from him by refusing to take his weapons, by keeping your own, and by striking him in his conscience from a higher level. He hits you physically, and you hit him spiritually.
E. Stanley JonesA man of true honor protects the unwritten word which binds his conscience more scrupulously, if possible, than he does the bond a breach of which subjects him to legal liabilities, and the United States, in aiming to maintain itself as one of the most enlightened nations, would do its citizens gross injustice if it applied to its international relations any other than a high standard of honor and morality.
Grover ClevelandA man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
William FaulknerLet it be henceforth proclaimed to the world that man's conscience was created free; that he is no longer accountable to his fellow man for his religious opinions, being responsible therefore only to his God.
John TylerI ask all Americans with a conscience to shun anything and everything to do with the murderous state of Georgia.
Michael MooreOne thing is certain. I am not afraid to act as my conscience dictates, no matter what the world may think.
Antoinette Brown BlackwellUnder the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.
Lewis F. Powell, Jr.Is television literally functioning as our conscience, tempting us and rewarding us at the same time?
Lauren ZalaznickModern 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.
Erich FrommSelf-approbation, when founded in truth and a good conscience, is a source of some of the purest joys known to man.
Charles SimmonsIt became very important for me to stand up and design with a conscience for environment, you know? Just because you like clothes doesn't mean that you have to throw your principles out the window.
Maria CornejoDeep within yourself, listen to your conscience which calls you to be pure...a home is not warmed by the fire of pleasure which burns quickly like a pile of withered grass. Passing encounters are only a caricature of love; they injure hearts and mock God's plan.
Pope John Paul IIWe must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.
Martin Luther King, Jr.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
William ShakespeareConscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe
William ShakespeareDon't aim at success โ the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run โ in the long run, I say โ success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
Viktor E. FranklScholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.
Friedrich NietzscheHe was a lifelong Republican, but over the years, Harry Blackmun built a reputation as a liberal, sometimes defiant Justice, whose fierce protection of individual rights led some to anoint him the moral conscience of the court.
Judy WoodruffDeep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
Jean BaudrillardEvery human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.
William Ellery ChanningI 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.
Beatrice DalleIf we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.
Antonin ScaliaVery 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.
Norbert Elias