“The writer is not only the conscience of the world, but also its nightmare.”

—  Teodor Burnar

Last update Nov. 30, 2023. History

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“By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

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“Disclosure and realization of potential are not only the basis of human happiness but also a duty to conscience and society.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Barbara Walters photo

“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.”

Barbara Walters (1929) American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality

Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually coined by Stan Barstow.
Misattributed

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983)

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “The Struggle Intensifies".

“Writers who are also artist's only think of themselves as truly living when they are engaged in their sweet labour.”

Edward Storer (1880–1944) British writer

'Leigh Hunt' Herbert and Daniel, London, 1913

Adolf A. Berle photo

“[Corporations must manifest in this area a conscience, or be required to] accept direction from the conscience of the government. This conscience must be built into institutions so that it can be invoked as a right by the individuals and interests subject to the corporate power… For twentieth-century capitalism will justify itself not only by its out-turn product, but by its content of life values.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: The 20th century capitalist revolution. 1954, p. 113-114; as cited in Prashker (1954)

John Stuart Mill photo

“The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. 1: Introductory

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