Quotes about conscience
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“Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;—which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,—the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, Religion, Soul, Light

“And so the blasts of calumny, howl they ever so fiercely over the good man's head, contribute to his juster appreciation and to his wider fame. Preserve only a good conscience toward God, and a loving purpose toward your fellow men, and you need not wince nor tremble, though the pack of the spaniel-hearted hounds snarl at your heels.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 215.

Love, Men, God, Heart

“All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 20

Death, Women, Men, Hunger

“Churchman recognized in his critical systemic thinking that the human mind is not able to know the whole. … Yet the human mind, for Churchman, may appreciate the essential quality of the whole. For Churchman, appreciation of this essential quality begins … when first you see the world through the eyes of another. The systems approach, he says, then goes on to discover that every worldview is terribly restricted. Consequently, with Churchman, a rather different kind of question about practice surfaces. … That is, who is to judge that any one bounded appreciation is most relevant or acceptable? Each judgment is based on a rationality of its own that chooses where a boundary is to be drawn, which issues and dilemmas thus get on the agenda, and who will benefit from this. For each choice it is necessary to ask, What are the consequences to be expected insofar as we can evaluate them and, on reflection, how do we feel about that? As Churchman points out, each judgment of this sort is of an ethical nature since it cannot escape the choice of who is to be the client—the beneficiary—and thus which issues and dilemmas will be central to debate and future action. In this way, the spirit of C. West Churchman becomes our moral conscience. A key principle of systemic thinking, according to Churchman, is to remain ethically alert. Boundary judgments facilitate a debate in which we are sensitized to ethical issues and dilemmas.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1999, p. 252-253) as cited in: Michael H. G. Hoffmann (2007) Searching for Common Ground on Hamas Through Logical Argument Mapping. p. 5.

World, Way, Feeling, Question

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

Hannah Arendt book Eichmann in Jerusalem

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. VIII.

People, Education, Law, Intelligence

“First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear.”

Pol Pot (1925–1998) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea

Nate Thayer interview (1997)

People, Personality

“The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 1. The Concept of the Renaissance

Age, World, Democracy, History

“What a man calls his "conscience" is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Brides
A Guide to Men (1922)

Love, Wine

“I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people, and take away their freedom of choice and religion.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

1564- Havo Exam

People, Religion, Freedom

“When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Introduction, p. xvi
Disturbing the Peace (1986)

Truth, Behavior, Personality

“I fear my own conscience on Africa. I fear the judgement of future generations, where history properly calculates the gravity of the suffering. I fear them asking: but how could wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, simply turn away to busy themselves with other things? What greater call to action could there be? Did they really know and yet do nothing? I feel that judgement of the future alongside the now. It gives me urgency. It fills me with determination.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Prime Minister's website http://web.archive.org/20051103003809/www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page7314.asp 11 March 2005, at the launch of the Commission for Africa Report. 2000s

People, Fear, Feeling, History

“Twenty-five years ago this Republic was bearing and wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people; the narrowing and disintegrating doctrine of State sovereignty had shackled and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the national government; and the grasping power of slavery was seizing upon the virgin territories of the West, and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage.
At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every human heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and to save.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Men, God, People, Soul

“There are things which we feel to be good and true, though in the cold light of reason and calculation many things remain incomprehensible and dark. And though the society in which we live considers such actions thoughtless, or reckless, or I don't know what else, what can we say if once the hidden forces of sympathy and love have been roused in us? And though it may be that we cannot argue against the reasoning sentiment and to act from impulse, one would almost conclude that some people have cauterized certain sensitive nerves within them, especially those which, combined, are called conscience. Well, I pity those people; they travel through life without compass, in my opinion.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo, from The Hague, c. 11 January 1883; as cited in Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh; ed. Irving Stone and Jean Stone (1995), ISBN 0452275040
1880s, 1883

Love, Life, People, Travel

“I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism. And I know that, based on reports, that the Obama administration gave this a lot of thought – a lot of discussion. This was not some little side issue that no one thought about. They gave it a lot of thought, and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and morning after pills to the employees of the church. And that came as a shock. As I think it was Mike Huckabee said, "We are now all Catholics."”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.
2012-04-03
Romney: Obama wants to ‘establish a religion called secularism’
David
Edwards
The Raw Story
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/03/romney-obama-wants-to-establish-a-religion-called-secularism/
2012-04-13
2012

War, People, Faith, Religion

“The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 76

“You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.”

Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008) British writer

"To Whom It May Concern", from Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits (1991).

Women

“A dissertation on the rights of man in a state of nature. He asserted that every man, merely natural, was an independent sovereign, subject to no law, but the law written on his heart, and revealed to him by his Maker in the constitution of his nature and the inspiration of his understanding and his conscience. His right to his life, his liberty, no created being could rightfully contest. Nor was his right to his property less incontestable. The club that he had snapped from a tree, for a staff or for defence, was his own. His bow and arrow were his own; if by a pebble he had killed a partridge or a squirrel, it was his own. No creature, man or beast, had a right to take it from him. If he had taken an eel, or a smelt, or a sculpion, it was his property. In short, he sported upon this topic with so much wit and humor, and at the same time so much indisputable truth and reason, that he was not less entertaining than instructive. He asserted that these rights were inherent and inalienable. That they never could be surrendered or alienated but by idiots or madmen, and all the acts of idiots and lunatics were void, and not obligatory by all the laws of God and man.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1810s, Letter to William Tudor (1818)

Life, God, Truth, Law

“[A certain Italian judge] declared in an interview that at night he has no need of sleeping pills since, with regards to the Law, his conscience is at peace. We believe him without further ado. But if he asked himself the same question with regards to Justice, I ask myself if his sleep would be equally untroubled. And we are after all aware that he'll never ask himself this question, and on the contrary it would seem to him totally odd. Because, for an Italian judge, the Law and Justice have nothing to do with each other.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Il testimone, p. 386.
2000s - 2010s

Peace, Justice, Law, Question

“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 22. Of Custom
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Law, Nature

“Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), New England Reformers

Men, Age, Music, Reading

“Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Pleasure, Fools, Feeling, Intelligence

“Amidst the confusion of the times, the conflicts of conscience, and the turmoil of daily living, an abiding faith becomes an anchor to our lives.”

Thomas S. Monson (1927–2018) president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Speaking at a C.E.S. fireside and reported in the Church News http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,40-1-3273-2,00.html|.

Faith, Time

“In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience to our dealing;
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing will continue stealing.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Motto of the American Copyright League. (Written Nov. 20, 1885).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Theodore Parker (1810–1860) abolitionist

This portion of Parker's sermon is thought to have inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.‎'s famous assertion of similar sentiments: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice". 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

World, Justice, Way, Understanding

“Don't let yourself become cynical. Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action. Cynicism corrodes the will, dulls the conscience, blunts your sense of right and wrong… Stay alert to fine distinctions: become a pessimist like me.”

Edward Abbey book Hayduke Lives

Hayduke Lives (1990)

Sense

“We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement.... we must concentrate outside ourselves.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Quote from Tobey's Bahai lecture, 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 66/67
1950's

World, Feeling, Water

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life, Men, Money, War

“There are no honest goods to buy or to sell; adulterated foods, shoddy manufacture of all that we wear, the underpaid labor and consumed life that make every garment a texture of falsehood, the hideous competitive war that slays its millions where swords and cannons slay their tens, all unite to baffle and mock the efforts of the awakened conscience at every turn, and make the industrial system seem like the triumph of hell and madness on the earth. Only by a sort of terrible daily denial of his spiritual self, a crucifixion of the principles by which he longs to organize his life, can a man wrest a stained and insecure livelihood from this terrible war for bread which we call industry.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 26-27

Life, War, Food, Hell

“I am to show you, too, that in the world of eternal free-agents, the Divine offices called creation and regeneration not only survive, but are transfigured; that in this transfiguration they are merged in one, so that regeneration is implicit in creation, and becomes the logical spring and aim of creation, while creation itself thus insures both generation and regeneration—the existence of the natural order within the spiritual or rational, and subject to this, and the consequent gradual transformation of the natural into the image of the spiritual: a process never to be interrupted, however devious, dark, or often retrograde, its course may be. I am to show you all this by the light of Final Cause, which is to take the place of the less rational category of Efficient Causation, since—let it be repeated — this last cannot operate to sustain moral relationship, and since moral values, measured in real freedom, are for the conscience and the new theology the measure of all reality.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.350-1

World, Spring, Nature, Reality

“If the Pilgrims were looking for freedom of conscience, they came to just the right place. In America, everybody's conscience is unusually free.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Miles Standish

Freedom

“A clere conscience is a sure carde.”

John Lyly book Euphues

Euphues, p. 207, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "This is a sure card", Thersytes, circa 1550.

“He was, indeed, in a condition, in which, if reason had interposed, though only to advise, she might have received the answer which one Cleostratus gave many years ago to a silly fellow, who asked him, if he was not ashamed to be drunk? "Are not you," said Cleostratus, "ashamed to admonish a drunken man?" — To say the truth, in a court of justice drunkenness must not be an excuse, yet in a court of conscience it is greatly so.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book V, Ch. 10
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

Truth, Justice

“How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

Review of Le Misanthrope, by Molière, at the Piccadilly (1962), p. 117
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Way, Question

“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Helen Burns to Jane (Ch. 8)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Hate, World

“A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend.”

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) Irish writer

Vivian, ch. 7; Tales and Novels, vol. 8, p. 80.

Pleasure, Country

“If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal

Passion, Indifference

““Continuous attention must be directed to the behaviour of others and ourselves, trying to pinpoint the creative aspect, the contribution towards the good, the opening towards a greater value, the courage of having decided against the majority. It will seem to us that the moral contribution of the ones who have made themselves the instruments of prejudice and privileges is small, and instead it is great the contribution of those who try to awaken the conscience of everyone, even with their own personal sacrifice.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Courage, Personality

“She [Chantal] did not understand him [Fiodor]. She never could and never would understand him, being as invulnerable in her truthfulness as he in his falseness. And yet, she hated him unconsciously with a jealous hatred — for what other name, alas, could be given to that revolt of her pure conscience, so well armed and, at the same time, so defenceless? She hated him instinctively as though he already possessed the incomparable secret with which to menace her, to menace God Himself.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: La joie (Joy) 1929, pp.48–49

God, Hate, Truth, Secret

“Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say…. Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: La joie (Joy) 1929, p.88

Secret, Soul, Past, Future

“I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book VIII, Ch. 2.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

“If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing—flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (pp. 404-405)

“Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 119-120)

Bird, Water, Sea

“Its no secret that a Conscience can sometimes be a Pest, Its no Secret that Ambition bites the Nails of Success”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"The Fly"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Secret, Success

“To be sure, the human individual can, even must, feel and know himself to be limited—and this is what distinguishes him from the animal—but he can become conscious of his limits, his finite-ness, only because he can make the perfection and infinity of his species the object either of his feeling, conscience, or thought. But if his limitations appear to him as emanating from the species, this can only be due to his delusion that he is identical with the species, a delusion intimately linked with the individual’s love of ease, lethargy, vanity, and selfishness; for a limit which I know to be mine alone, humiliates, shames, and disquiets me. Hence, in order to free myself of this feeling of shame, this uneasiness, I make the limits of my individuality the limits of man’s being itself. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should this worry me at all? It is not due to any fault of mine or of my understanding: the cause lies in the understanding of the species itself. But it is a folly, a ludicrous and frivolous folly to designate that which constitutes the nature of man and the absolute nature of the individual, the essence of the species, as finite and limited.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 103-104
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Love, Feeling, Understanding, Nature

“Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.”

Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) British writer

The Human Origin of Morals http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mccabe02.htm (1926), p. 59.

Age, Light, Past

“Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.”

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) Poet

Poem: The Drunken Fisherman http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/onlinepoems.htm

Life, Fish, Sun, Dance

“She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 13. Mildred is the daughter of Elliot and Bernice Pritchard.

Life, Secret, Dreams, Way

“The secret belief that the Lord of conscience loves and accepts each faithful sacrifice is the ultimate and sufficient support of all goodness; dispensing with the chorus of approving voices; replacing all vain self-reliance with a Divine strength; and with the peace of a reconciled nature consoling the inevitable sorrows of a devoted life.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Hours of Thought on Sacred Things (1879), p. 190.

Love, Life, Secret, Peace

“This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Prosecutor: Manning let secrets into enemy hands= The Oaklahoman, 2013-06-03, 2013-06-04 http://newsok.com/prosecutor-manning-let-secrets-into-enemy-hands/article/feed/549470/?page=2,Regarding the [Bradley Manning] trial.

People, Truth, Justice, Exercises

“My favorite activity is conscience dreaming.”

Jared Lee Loughner (1988) Charged with 2011 Tucson shooting

December 8, 2010, video posting — www.kgun9.com, 9OYS Investigates: Who is Jared Loughner?, KGUN9, January 8, 2011, 2011-01-10 http://www.kgun9.com/Global/story.asp?S=13809065,

Dreams

“I cannot but add that I have always been a supporter and defender of your policy when you were Prime Minister. I am sure that it was right. In view of the attitude of France and of the unreadiness of this country for which you were in no way to be blamed, it would have been folly to precipitate then a war with Germany. It was your strength of will and purpose and self-restraint that saved us from that mistake. When the time to meet the challenge of Hitler came, you had made it plain to the whole impartial world that you had done everything possible to keep Europe from war, and to fix the blame for that calamity on the unbridled ambition of Hitler. You enabled your country to enter the war with a clear conscience and a united will.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang to Chamberlain (6 October 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 462-463.
About

War, World, Way, Support

“Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, p. 20 (newspaper column: “Political Dictionary,” March 19, 1936)

Freedom

“It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.
What is Enlightenment? (1784)

Books, Understanding, Thinking

“You don’t like me saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one generally doesn’t have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 4 (p. 63)

Truth

“The civil state is bound before God to take off that bond and yoke of soul oppression, and to proclaim free and impartial liberty to all the people of the three nations to choose and maintain what worship and ministry their souls and consciences are persuaded of; which act, as it will prove an act of mercy and righteousness to the enslaved nations, so is it of a binding force to engage the whole and every interest and conscience to preserve the common freedom and peace; however, an act most suiting with the piety and Christianity of the Holy Testament of Christ Jesus.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Hireling Ministry, None of Christ's (1652)

God, People, Peace, Soul

“The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 393 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=410&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Education, Justice, Way, Past

“Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in what books it may be written that it is not sinful to slay animals and to eat them, it is more clearly written in the heart of man than in any books that animals are to be pitied and should not be slain any more than human beings. We all know this if we do not choke the voice of our conscience.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom (posthumous), Part I, International Book Publishing Company, New York, 1919, p. 68

Men, God, Books, Thinking

“People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Said by Mrs. Brookenham in The Awkward Age http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/akage10.txt (1899), book VI, ch. III.

People

“Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 139

Art

“…the concentration of human beings in towns…is contrary to nature, and…this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population…countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children…are starved of air and space and sunshine. …This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilisation and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathise with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us…the air must be purified…the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean…the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Belmont (25 January 1907), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 588
Prime Minister

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Much less could regeneration, the bringing-on of voluntary repentance and genuine reformation in the soul, be by any sort of efficient causality,—a truth to which modern theology has evidently for some time been alive, as its forward movement is keyed upon the increasing recognition of the metaphor in the name. These thoughts, however incontrovertible they may be, are no doubt staggering thoughts, so much are we of old habituated to calling regeneration the "work" of the Holy Spirit, and to naming man the "creature" of God, and God his "maker." Still, staggering though they be, they must be true if human freedom is to be a fact; and that human freedom is to be a fact, the modern conscience, quickened by the very experience of the Christian spirit itself, firmly declares, having now apprehended that otherwise there is no justice in human responsibility, and then no moral government, but only government edictive and compulsory; and then — no personal God, no true God, at all!”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.334-5

God, Truth, Justice, Soul

“In hell, sinners shall forever lay all the blame on their own wills. Hell is a rational torment by conscience.”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), "The People Who Receive the Saints' Rest"

Hell

“Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

N'envions point à une sorte de gens leurs grandes richesses; ils les ont à titre onéreux, et qui ne nous accommoderait point: ils ont mis leur repos, leur santé, leur honneur et leur conscience pour les avoir; cela est trop cher, et il n'y a rien à gagner à un tel marché.
Aphorism 13
Les Caractères (1688), Des biens de fortune

Men, Health, Peace, Envy

“Men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Pope, or an infallible conscience, or an infallible Christ, and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth. I believe all that kind of talk is false. It is false psychology or a failure of insight, and it is the fruit of mental laziness; a refusal to think things through. The most important convictions in religion cannot really be reached on the word of another. We can assent to propositions out of laziness of thought, or a desire to please, or an inability to argue, but one of the reasons why, in a crisis, men often feel let down by their religion is that they glibly assented to this or that, and falsely called their assent ‘belief.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.50

Men, Truth, Religion, Feeling

“Alas! alas! too often conscience sleeps,
When pleasure's syren numbers lull its rest.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II, VIII
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Pleasure, Sleep

“I am a man of causes; I am not an individualist, and in my heart and conscience I do not think I could serve society as I would like to with this level of support.”

Bernard Landry (1937–2018) Canadian politician

In Radio-Canada, ""Biographies: Bernard Landry"" http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/dossiers/tetes/landry/,retrieved August 28, 2005 quote from Landry's resignation speech, made after winning a party confidence vote by only 76.2%.

Support, Thinking, Heart

“Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance."”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 16: Politics

Women, Men, People, World

“The slavery debate has been really a death-struggle from that moment. Mr. Clay thought not. Mr. Clay was a shrewd politician, but the difference between him and Calhoun was the difference between principle and expediency. Calhoun's sharp, incisive genius has engraved his name, narrow but deep, upon our annals. The fluent and facile talents of Clay in a bold, large hand wrote his name in honey upon many pages. But time is already licking it away. Henry Clay was our great compromiser. That was known, and that was the reason why Mr. Buchanan's story of a bargain with J. Q. Adams always clung to Mr. Clay. He had compromised political policies so long that he had forgotten there is such a thing as political principle, which is simply a name for the moral instincts applied to government. He did not see that when Mr. Calhoun said he should return to the Constitution he took the question with him, and shifted the battle-ground from the low, poisonous marsh of compromise, where the soldiers never know whether they are standing on land or water, to the clear, hard height of principle. Mr. Clay had his omnibus at the door to roll us out of the mire. The Whig party was all right and ready to jump in. The Democratic party was all right. The great slavery question was going to be settled forever. The bushel-basket of national peace and plenty and prosperity was to be heaped up and run over. Mr. Pierce came all the way from the granite hills of New Hampshire, where people are supposed to tell the truth, to an- nounce to a happy country that it was at peace — that its bushel-basket was never so overflowingly full before. And then what? Then the bottom fell out. Then the gentlemen in the national rope -walk at Washington found they had been busily twining a rope of sand to hold the country together. They had been trying to compromise the principles of human justice, not the percentage of a tariff; the instincts of human nature and consequently of all permanent government, and the conscience of the country saw it. Compromises are the sheet-anchor of the Union — are they? As the English said of the battle of Bunker Hill, that two such victories would ruin their army, so two such sheet- anchors as the Compromise of 1850 would drag the Union down out of sight forever.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Death, Happiness, People, Truth

“He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man.”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 2

Death, Truth

“Disclosures about the magnitude of covert State surveillance and well-known examples of intimidation of human rights defenders shock the conscience and require public discussion and corrective action in each country and by the international community. In a democratic society, it is crucial for citizens to know whether their Governments are acting constitutionally or are engaged in policies that violate international law and human rights. It is their civic duty to protest against Government secrecy and cover-ups, the chilling effect of disproportionate surveillance, acts of intimidation and harassment, arbitrary arrests and defamation of human rights defenders, including whistleblowers, as unpatriotic or even traitors, when in fact they may be the most effective defenders of the rule of law. These acts of surveillance and intimidation are hallmarks of totalitarianism, not of democratic governance.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. 2013

Law, Communication, Country

“It is true that other Nations may, as they do, enforce contrary rules of conscience and conduct. It is true that policies may be pursued under flags other than our own, but those policies are beyond our jurisdiction. Yet in our inner individual lives we can never be indifferent, and we assert for ourselves complete freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the principles for which our flag has so long been the lofty symbol. As it was so well said by James Madison, over a century ago: "We hold it for a fundamental and inalienable truth that religion and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence."”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Address at San Diego Exposition (1935)

Truth, Religion, Freedom, Indifference

“It is the business of the teacher … to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 242

Business, Teachers

“We are no longer fighting a great enemy, we are asserting a great principle: that the talents and dreams of average people — their warm human hopes and loves — should be rewarded by freedom and protected by peace. We are defending the nobility of normal lives, lived in obedience to God and conscience, not to government.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

1990s, A Distinctly American Internationalism (November 1999)

Love, God, People, Peace

“The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 70

Men

“No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 76

Disease, Imagination

“For me the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or ‘the still small Voice’ mean one and the same thing. I saw no form. I have never tried, for I have always believed God to be without form. One who realizes God is freed from sin for ever…. But what I did hear was like a Voice from afar and yet quite near. It was as unmistakable as some human voice definitely speaking to me, and irresistible. I was not dreaming at the time I heard the Voice. The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed…. Could I give any further evidence that it was truly the Voice that I heard and that it was not an echo of my own heated imagination? I have no further evidence to convince the sceptic. He is free to say that it was all self-delusion or hallucination. It may well have been so. I can offer no proof to the contrary. But I can say this — that not the unanimous verdict of the whole world against me could shake me from the belief that what I heard was the true voice of God.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan (1933, July 8); also in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 61), and in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi (Prabhu and Rao, eds., 1967, pp. 33-34)
1930s

God, Truth, World, Dreams

“[Fitzpatrick] seems a strapping and genteel looking young man, and more fit to be a starcher to laundress than a trooper, but to a keen observer he has the wrong appearance to have anything like a clear conscience or a manly heart. The deceit is plain lit to be seen in the white cabbage-hearted looking face.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Cameron Letter (1878)

Appearance, Heart

“If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so. And as a matter and duty of conscience, the notion that one should stay silent — and as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Speech in the U.S. Senate (2017)

World, Behavior, Strong

“He's the smartest guy in Congress, but he insists on voting his conscience instead of party.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Remarks about John B. Anderson in 1973, later quoted in an Anderson 1980 Presidential campaign ad http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1980/john-anderson 1970s

Guy

“The great difficulty in forming legitimate governments is in persuading those forming the governments that those who are to be their fellow citizens are equal to them in the rights, which their common government is to protect. Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Europe looked upon each other as less than human, and slaughtered each other without pity and without compunction. It was impossible for there to be a common citizenship of those who did not look upon each other as possessing the same right of conscience. How one ought to worship God cannot be settled by majority rule. A majority of one faith cannot ask a minority of another faith to submit their differences to a vote. George Washington, in 1793, said that our governments were not formed in the gloomy ages of ignorance and superstition, but at a time when the rights of man were better understood than in any previous age. Washington was right, in that such rights were, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in America, better understood. But they were not perfectly understood, as the continued existence of chattel slavery attests. A difference concerning the equal rights of persons of color made the continued existence of a common government of all Americans impossible. A great civil war had to be fought, ending the existence of slavery, reuniting the nation and rededicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Central Idea (2006)

Men, God, War, Age

“Humans have evolved a leadership brain. Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Paul R. Lawrence, quoted in: " The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-drive-to-acquires-impact-on-globalization," at hbswk.hbs.edu, 23 august 2010.

People

“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 Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 156.

Men, Childhood

“Matt’s murder is a parable for our times. It tells of what happens to the conscience of the country when it fails to be free for all and accord every person dignity. How we consume and destroy our children…our future.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

America...You Kill Me

Children, Time, Future, Personality

“When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

Faith, Reality, Memory

““Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their conscience with the gift of survival.”
Miriamele thought about the obvious truth of what Cadrach had said as they walked on, but could not understand why it made her so unutterably sad.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 2, “Masks and Shadows” (p. 37).

Truth, Sadness, Understanding, Princess

“I have fundamental reservations to this adaptation. First of all I would have liked to see the planet Solaris which the director unfortunately denied me as the film was to be a cinematically subdued work. And secondly — as I told Tarkovsky during one of our quarrels — he didn't make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment. What we get in the film is only how this abominable Kelvin has driven poor Harey to suicide and then he has pangs of conscience which are amplified by her appearance; a strange and incomprehensible appearance. […]”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

On Solaris screening (1972)

Suicide, Appearance

“We glory most in the fact, that Scripture so commends itself to the conscience, and experience so bears out the Bible, that the gospel can go the round of the world, and carry with it, in all its travel, its own mighty credentials.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 36.

World, Travel

“He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who ever stood up to him.”

Joseph Conrad book The Shadow Line

Referring to Mr. Burns. Compare to Heart of Darkness' manager: "He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that very well..."
The Shadow Line (1915)

God, Hate, Fear, Thinking

“Many and opposite are the lots in life, and unequal are the portions which they measure out to the children of earth. We cannot agree with those who contend that the difference after all is but in outward seeming. Such an assertion is often the result of thoughtlessness — sometimes the result of selfishness. It is one of the good points of human nature, that it revolts against human suffering. Few there are who can witness pain, whether of mind or of body, without pity, and the desire to alleviate; but such is our infirmity of purpose, that a little suffices to turn us aside from assistance. Indolence, difficulties, and contrary interests come in the way of sympathy, and then we desire to excuse our apathy to ourselves. It is a comfortable doctrine to suppose that the evil is made up by some mysterious allotment of good; it is an excuse for non-interference, and we let conscience sleep over our own enjoyments, taking it for granted others have them also — though how we know not.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Life, Pain, Children, Way

“A satellite has no conscience.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

On receiving the "Family of Man" Award (1964)

“Even if I had all the crimes possible on my conscience, I am sure I should lose none of my confidence. Heartbroken with repentance, I would simply throw myself into my Saviour's arms, for I know how much He loves the prodigal son. I have heard what He said to Mary Magdalene, to the woman taken in adultery, and the Samaritan woman. No one can make me frightened any more, because I know what to believe about His mercy and His love; I know that in the twinkling of an eye all those thousands of sins would be consumed as a drop of water cast into a blazing fire.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

Story of a Soul (1897)

Love, Confidence, Water

“…it is a revolution without any mandate from the people. (Cheers.) Now, gentlemen, it is in the first place a revolution in fiscal methods…this Budget is introduced as a Liberal measure. If so, all I can say is that it is a new Liberalism and not the one that I have known and practised under more illustrious auspices than these. (Cheers.) Who was the greatest, not merely the greatest Liberal, but the greatest financier that this country has ever known? (A voice, "Gladstone.") I mean Mr. Gladstone. (Cheers.) With Sir Robert Peel—he, I think, occupied a position even higher than Sir Robert Peel—for boldness of imagination and scope of financing Mr. Gladstone ranks as the great financial authority of our time. (Cheers.) Now, we have in the Cabinet at this moment several colleagues, several ex-colleagues of mine, who served in the Cabinet with Mr. Gladstone…and I ask them, without a moment's fear or hesitation as to the answer that would follow if they gave it from their conscience, with what feelings would they approach Mr. Gladstone, were he Prime Minister and still living, with such a Budget as this? Mr. Gladstone would be 100 in December if he were alive; but, centenarian as he would be, I venture to say that he would make short work of the deputation of the Cabinet that waited on him with the measure, and they would soon find themselves on the stairs and not in the room. (Laughter and cheers.) In his eyes, and in my eyes, too, as a humble disciple, Liberalism and Liberty were cognate terms. They were twin-sisters. How does the Budget stand the test of Liberalism so understood and of Liberty as we have always comprehended it? This Budget seems to establish an inquisition, unknown previously in Great Britain, and a tyranny, I venture to say, unknown to mankind…I think my friends are moving on the path that leads to Socialism. How far they are advanced on that path I will not say, but on that path I, at any rate, cannot follow them an inch. (Loud cheers.) Any form of protection is an evil, but Socialism is the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of prosperity, of the monarchy, of Empire.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Loud cheers.
Speech in Glasgow attacking the "People's Budget" (10 September 1909), reported in The Times (11 September 1909), pp. 7-8.

People, Fear, Family, Faith

“A man's conscience is an unsteady judge of right and wrong.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Arnas Arnæus
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

“Facts witness to the reality that [Christians] have abandoned God, that they have entered the world and become one with the world. Whatever the world considers praiseworthy – vanity, comfort, wealth, fancy notions, blasphemies – the Christians, too, praise with one accord, quite blatantly without shame and without conscience. We can find with difficulty one man in a thousand who does not conform himself to the world.”

Petr Chelčický book The Net of Faith

Source: The Net of Faith (c. 1443), Chapter 95

God, World, Reality, Wealth

“They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators.' No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Referenced in the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/25/clinton-heckled-by-black-lives-matter-activist, about a 1996 statement. White House years (1993–2000)

Way