“But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. … We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.”

—  Georg Brandes

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 25-26

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Georg Brandes 40
Danish literature critic and scholar 1842–1927

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