Gaio Valerio Catullo quote: “All right and wrong, confounded in impious madness, turned from us the righteous will of the gods.”

“The 'Union' arrangements are all a humbug. They reverse the scriptural order, calling the righteous and not sinners to repentance. Let us not be slandered or intimidated to turn from our duty. Eternal right makes might. As we understand our duty, let us do it!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

“The 'Union' arrangements are all a humbug. They reverse the scriptural order, calling the righteous and not sinners to repentance. Let us not be slandered or intimidated to turn from our duty. Eternal right makes might. As we understand our duty, let us do it!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

“Now if thou be a bondslave vile become,
No wrong is that, but God's most righteous doom.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Or se tu se' vil serva, e il tuo servaggio
(Non ti lagnar) giustizia, e non oltraggio.
Canto I, stanza 51 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

“Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: The Devil's Web

“The gods behold all righteous actions.”
Di pia facta vident.

Ovid Fasti

II, 117
Fasti (The Festivals)

“At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The Study of History (1895)
Context: Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present.