Quotes about Conscience
As for clothing, [...] perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. [...] No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
— Henry David Thoreau
if injustice, is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
— Henry David Thoreau
Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.
— Henry David Thoreau
Good writing as well as good acting will be obedience to conscience. There must not be a particle of will or whim mixed with it. If we can listen, we shall hear. By reverently listening to the inner voice, we may reinstate ourselves on the pinnacle of humanity.
— Henry David Thoreau
One afternoon ... I was seized and put into jail, because ... I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
— Henry David Thoreau
For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
— Herman Melville
The loudest preacher in the world is your conscience, the cleverest is wisdom, the rowdiest is passion, the surest is truth, the purest is love, and the highest is God.
— Matshona Dhliwayo
Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought
— Abraham Lincoln
Freedom is not the ability to do anything we want, whenever we want. Rather, FREEDOM is the ability to live responsibly the truth of our relationship with God and with one another.
— Pope John Paul II