“The question here is not, “How conscience ought to be guided? For Conscience is its own General and Leader; it is therefore enough that each man have one. What we want to know is, how conscience can be her own Ariadne”
Book IV, Part 2, Section 4
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)
Context: The question here is not, “How conscience ought to be guided? For Conscience is its own General and Leader; it is therefore enough that each man have one. What we want to know is, how conscience can be her own Ariadne, and disentangle herself from the mazes even of the most raveled and complicated casuistical theology. Here is an ethical proposition that stands in need of no proof: No Action May At Any Time Be Hazarded On The Uncertainty That Perchance It May Not Be Wrong (Quod dubitas, ne feceris! Pliny - which you doubt, then neither do) Hence the Consciousness, that Any Action I am about to perform is Right, is in itself a most immediate and imperative duty. What actions are right, - what wrong – is a matter for the understanding, not for conscience. p. 251
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Immanuel Kant 200
German philosopher 1724–1804Related quotes
“No conscience which is a palimpsest of the consciences of others is a safe guide.”
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 29
Statement as UK prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials (1945), as quoted in The Nuremberg Trials (1983) by Ann Tusa and John Tusa, ISBN 0815412622
Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “The Struggle Intensifies".
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853), III : Of Justice and the Conscience https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Sermons_of_Religion/Of_Justice_and_the_Conscience
Context: Man naturally loves justice, for its own sake, as the natural object of his conscience. As the mind loves truth and beauty, so conscience loves the right; it is true and beautiful to the moral faculties. Conscience rests in justice as an end, as the mind in truth. As truth is the side of God turned towards the intellect, so is justice the side of Him which conscience looks upon. Love of justice is the moral part of piety.
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
Said to avant-garde artists Ely Bielutin and Ernst Neizvestny during a visit to their exhibition (1 December 1962)
“I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.”
Source: A Lesson Before Dying
