conscience quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 

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.

Anne Frank: 

Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.

Carl Jung: 

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.'

Christopher Reeve: 

I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Erich Fromm: 

The paradoxical -- and tragic -- situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.

H. L. Mencken: 

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Hannah Arendt: 

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC: 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Izaak Walton: 

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

James Freeman Clarke: 

Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.

John Calvin: 

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul. 

Joseph Cook: 

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Kenneth Kaunda: 

The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 

While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.

Lillian Hellman: 

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. [Letter to the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, 1952]

Mark Twain: 

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Martin Niemöller: 

First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists. I was silent. I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists. I was silent. I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me. There was no one left to speak for me.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

The Roots of Violence: 
Wealth without work, 
Pleasure without conscience, 
Knowledge without character, 
Commerce without morality, 
Science without humanity, 
Worship without sacrifice, 
Politics without principles.

Origen: 

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert G. Ingersoll: 

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Robert Redford: 

Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.

Theodore Parker: 

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. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

Thomas Paine: 

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

William Ellery Channing: 

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.