Compunction Quotes

Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on their pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed upon me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state--remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives--and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said--and he was right. Talking to a teacher we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. ~ Thomas Bernhard

But shame, for Mannering, was an emotion that attended only failure; he could not be made to feel compunction if he had not, in his own estimation, failed. ~ Eleanor Catton

His mind was of a most phlegmatic sort, cool in its private applications, quick, and excessively rational; he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms. ~ Eleanor Catton

Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?'
I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action
that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one. ~ Socrates

The necklace, Marcos," she said firmly, leveling the gun at his heart once more. "I'll take it now."

"It's not here, querida. You waste your time."

Francesca lowered the gun to point at his groin. "Killing you would be too good. Perhaps I will simply have to deprive the female world of your ability to make love ever again. I am quite a good shot, I assure you."

She'd learned out of necessity. And though she never wanted to harm another human being, she had no compunction about making this man think she would do so if it meant she could save Jacques.

His voice dropped to a growl. A hateful, angry growl. "You won't get away with this. Whoever you are, Frankie, I will find you. I will find you and make you wish you'd never met me."

Her heart flipped in her chest. She ignored it. "I already wish that. Now give me the jewel before you lose the ability to ever have children."

Bitterness twisted inside her as she said those words. Ironic to threaten someone with something she would never wish on another soul. But she had to be hard, cold, ruthless – just like he was.

He stared at her in impotent fury, his jaw grinding, his beautiful black eyes flashing daggers at her. Very slowly, he reached up with one hand and slipped his bowtie free of its knot.

Then he jerked it loose and let it fall. ~ Lynn Raye Harris

He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn't hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should've known better–overeducated progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists–had no compunction explaining things to me. ~ Alexis M. Smith

The child who is permitted to torment, or destroy, the minutest object in creation, who will wantonly tread upon a worm, or unhumanly pass a pin through the body of a fly, will in all probabiilty, as he increases in years, feel no more compunction at tormenting a fellow-creature, than he did in witnessing the wreathing agonies of a fly. ~ Laetitia Pilkington

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal.

Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick rema ~ James Gould Cozzens

Society was in a fearful state. When human life was held at so cheap a rate and when brutal courage was at such a premium; when men had no compunction about getting drunk, if rum could be had; when it was no robbery to take all a Tory had, and no murder to hang him; when children grew to manhood who had never spent a month in the schoolroom, and who had never heard a sermon, it was not to be expected that the morals of the people would be high, or their manners refined, or their intelligence considerable. ~ George Gilman Smith

I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world. ~ Al Gore

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life. ~ George Eliot

I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself. ~ Margaret Atwood

Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings; compassion, in the first instance, is good for both; I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would. ~ Walter Savage Landor

And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them. He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother's ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father's temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague. ~ Michael Chabon

Then we discover what the spiritual life really is. It is not a matter of doing one good work rather than another, of living in one place or in another, of praying in one way rather than in another. It is not a matter of any special psychological effect in our own soul. If it is the silence of our whole being in compunction and adoration before God, in the habitual realization that He is everything and we are nothing, that He is the Center to which all things tend, and to Whom all our actions must be directed. ~ Thomas Merton

compunction, and her cigarette dangles from her scarlet-tipped hand. She hasn't ~ Beatriz Williams

The greedy man who is fond of his fish stew has no compunction in cutting up the fish according to his need. But the man who loves the fish wants to enjoy it in the water; and if that is impossible he waits on the bank; and even if he comes back home without a sight of it he has the consolation of knowing that the fish is all right. Perfect gain is the best of all; but if that is impossible, then the next best gain is perfect losing. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic ... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject. ~ David Salle

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986) ~ Wendell Berry

When your soul is pricked by compunction and gradually changed, it becomes a fountain flowing with rivers of tears and compunction. If any one of you ever happens to communicate with tears, whether you weep before the Liturgy or in the course of the Divine Liturgy, or at the very time that you receive the Divine Gifts, and does not desire to do this for the rest of his days and nights, it will avail him nothing to have wept merely once. It is not this alone that at once purifies us and makes us worthy; it is daily compunction that does not cease until death. ~ Symeon The New Theologian

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs. If ~ Sigmund Freud

...[Y]ou know very well the truth of what I [say]... I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility; and this is what will bring about my destruction, if anything does... the slander and jealousy of a very large section of the people. They have been fatal to a great many other innocent men, and I suppose will continue to be so; there is no likelihood that they will stop at me. But perhaps someone will say 'Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death-penalty?' I might fairly reply to him 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one...['] The truth of the matter is this, gentlemen. Where a man has once taken up his stand, either because it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or anything else before dishonour. ~ Socrates

Adventure is not outside man; it is within. ~ George Eliot

Strange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Hm," said the Count, rubbing his lips and regarding Miles with cool approval. "Interesting. Well. For your fourth consoling thought, I would point out that in this venue" - a wave of his finger took in Vorbarr Sultana, and by extension Barrayar - "acquiring a reputation as a slick and dangerous man, who would kill without compunction to obtain and protect his own, is not all bad. In fact, you might even find it useful. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

It's harder to kill people. The empathy is so much stronger that the mind must invent new reasons. But, if we can somehow link it to our own survival, the mind will make the devious twists and turns necessary to rationalize it. We're very good at that. But it changes people. They learn to hate. Your wolf doesn't need to hate what he kills. It would be easier if we could kill without compunction, like your wolf does, but then, we wouldn't be human. ~ Jean M. Auel

She was honest enough to admit she married him because actions other men would not conceive of to start with or carry out to finish with were ordinary for [him] ... not that she ever wanted or needed a husband who would steal without compunction, but she wanted that toughness, that hard eyed indifference to what anyone else thought, to - danger. ~ Ellen O'Connell

That tender compunction of the honest-minded, so different from the hateful intoxication of criminals ... ~ Marquis De Sade

Before long, my mother's friend, who, at the last minute, decided to stay for dinner, was asked to sit where I'd sat at lunch. Oliver's place setting was instantly removed,

The removal was performed summarily, without a hint of regret or compunction, the way you'd remove a bulb that was no longer working, or scrape out the entrails of a butchered sheep, or take off the sheets and blankets from a bed where someone had died. Here, take these, and remove them from sight. I watched his silverware, his place mat, his napkin, his entire being disappear. It presaged exactly what would happen less than a month from now. ~ Andre Aciman

Finding that she was determined to get to the bottom of what seemed to him a very trivial affair, extricated himself without hesitation or compunction by advising her to apply to Vincent for information, since he was the instigator of the quarrel. Before he could make good his retreat, however, he was incensed and appalled by a command to go immediately to Vincent's room, and to inform him that his mama desired to have speech with him before he went down to breakfast. Since it was the time-honoured practice of the brothers to sacrifice each other in such situations as now confronted Claud, it was not fear of Vincent's wrath at finding himself betrayed which prompted Claud to despatch Polyphant on the errand, but the knowledge that not even a messenger bearing gifts of great price would meet with anything but the rudest of receptions from Vincent at this hour of the morning. ~ Georgette Heyer

Prayer is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but earnestness of soul. ~ Hannah More

Once an opportunist like Mickey, who took the argument when she jumped on some devastated wretch's machine and jackpotted that it was the "cash-ino's money" she was winning, Moon returned after her six month break with the view that the separation had somehow sweetened the honeypot. The sad reality, she quickly learned, was that she was not irreplaceable; as such, the Casino felt no compunction to welcome her back with multi-jackpots. Instead, it took her money everyday and did not once give her a jackpot so that she could say, "Ah. They missed me." Instead, all she could keep saying was, "Verr-y bed. Verr-y bed. Suck-ah all my money! ~ Hope Barrett

It's amazing [ ... ] how perfectly honest people who would starve rather than steal sixpence, will steal books without compunction. ~ Jill Paton Walsh

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Mr. Elliot is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character. He has no feeling for others. Those whom he has been the chief cause of leading into ruin, he can neglect and desert without the slightest compunction. He is totally beyond the reach of any sentiment of justice or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black! ~ Jane Austen