Moral Conscience Quotes

Men after the heart of God become the moral conscience, the guidance and custodians of justice, not simply in the security of the four walls of their church ~ Sunday Adelaja

But dogs, which have no ability to sin nor moral conscience, do not have an ability to reject Jesus. ~ Rick Warren

If perception is limited by experience and knowledge, what deems my actions "correct" or my thoughts as moral? ~ Kierra C.T. Banks

While all men within our territories are protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of their consciences; it is rationally to be expected from them in return, that they will [demonstrate] the innocence of their lives and the beneficence of their actions; for no man, who is profligate in his morals, or a bad member of the civil community, can possibly be a true Christian, or a credit to his own religious society. ~ George Washington

There will be no stability of world-peace till the educated lack moral conscience. ~ Md. Mujib Ullah

[Black nationalism] is not designed to make the black man reevaluate the white man
you know him already
but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don't change the white man's mind; you can't change his mind. And that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America
America's conscience is bankrupt. ~ Malcolm X

Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves. ~ Emile Durkheim

At Vatican II my mind was growing through the embryonic beginning of a reversal of moral conscience unlike any I had known. I found myself increasingly critical of the Freudian psychoanalysis that had long shaped my interest in personal behavior change. I better recognized the long captivity of Protestant pastoral care to contemporary psychology and became a critic of the very accommodation to modern consciousness that I myself had advocated throughout the preceding decade. ~ Thomas C. Oden

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved. ~ Jose Saramago

Honor is the moral conscience of the great. ~ William Davenant

But there is some connection between critically distancing oneself from prevailing popular opinion and a level of moral conscientiousness that comes to more than obeying the voice of "the Anyone." Crucial to genuine moral conscience is the refusal to lose oneself in the anonymity of what "the Anyone" dictates, a willingness to take one's stand aqainst what is fashionable, to criticize public opinion for the sake of the community, to judge what is right beyond the horizon of the taken-for-granted. That one think for oneself, of course, is no guarantee that one's judgement will be wise. If not thinking can lead to great evil, it does not follow that thinking can prevent it. But at least the habit of critical reflection puts an obstacle in the way of banal evil, for the thoughtful individual may have afterthoughts about saying or doing what he cannot account for. Moral conscience, Arendt contends, is a 'side-effect' of the thinking ego, of the self who would, like Socrates, prefer that 'the multitudes disagree with me than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with and contradict myself. ~ Lawrence Vogel

If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature. ~ C.S. Lewis

No, moral conscience is one thing, the law is another. We have to hold onto this difference. ~ Rocco Buttiglione

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely... ~ Cheikh Anta Diop

I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine. ~ Otto Ohlendorf

There's obviously a correlation between an economically empowered woman and the investments she makes. That leads to her social and moral conscience for bettering her community. ~ Andrea Jung

England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book 'immoral' or 'moral' should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it's impossible to deal with them. ~ Charles Hamilton Sorley

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog's skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal gardens turn into New England jungle. The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness and talent aren't everything. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it. ~ Frank A. Clark

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue. ~ Susan Sontag

The connection between economics and the moral virtue of loving our neighbor is unmistakable to the observant. ~ Joe R Kesler

The panic crept closer, accompanied by a niggling doubt. Could she go back to her time? Did she want to? He shoved both thoughts aside forcefully. They were betrothed. It was too late for thinking. A betrothal was as binding as marriage. He could bed her with a clear conscience, sire sons and daughters on her and not call them bastards. She was bound to him and it was a bond she could not break. He would make certain of that. She'd stolen his heart, damn her, and he wouldn't let that go unpunished. ~ Lynn Kurland

The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man. Let me explain what I mean by the white liberal. In America there is no such thing as Democrat or Republican anymore. In America you have liberals and conservatives. The only people living in the past who think in terms of I'm a Democrat or Republican, is the American Negro. He's the one that runs around bragging about party affiliation. He's the one that sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican. But white people are divided into two groups, liberals and conservative. The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. The white liberal aren't white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro ~ Malcom X

One is happy once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience. ~ George Sand

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

...the capital city had grown in alarming fashion: cardboard walls, tin roofs, people in rags clearly visible along the road from the airport. Since this made a very bad impression on visitors, for a long time the solution was to put up walls to hide them. As one politician said, 'Where there is poverty, hide it. ~ Isabel Allende

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude. ~ Michael Finkel

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake. ~ Rick Perlstein

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does. ~ Evan Esar

It's easy to tune out your critics, but difficult to turn off your conscience. ~ Frank Sonnenberg

And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion. ~ Daniel Goleman

The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations ... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed. ~ Jane Addams

We must have moral education in the schools, anti-bullying programs, but this does not mean programs to feminize boys. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers. ~ Quentin Tarantino

We are warned by the Word both of our duty, our danger, and our remedy. On the sea of life there would be many more wrecks if it were not for the divine storm-signals which give to the watchful a timely warning. The Bible should be our Mentor, our Monitor, our Memento Mori, our Remembrancer, and the Keeper of our Conscience. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Sociopath is a word that has sort of become shorthand for psychopath and there's a distinct difference, it's interesting if you look it up. Sociopath if you look at the medical definition, the profile of a sociopath is that they are supremely intelligent people that are also pathological liars, they have no moral structure and there is one more, they have no compassion or empathy for other people. ~ Cillian Murphy

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them. ~ Thomas Hardy

Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything. ~ T Bone Burnett

Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one's mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. ~ Algis Valiunas

The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience. ~ Hassan Blasim

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. ~ Jonathan Haidt

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

All quiet at the Tilden.

Except for the obese wife of a wealthy industrialist, the furtive face of a raw food quack and the memory of a silk-shirted hoodlum tossing a bill on the carpet for you to crawl and fetch.

All quiet except for the tortured face of a grey-eyed, ash-blonde lovely with a showgirl's body and a conscience heavier than a carload of sins. Mouth, a slash of red; eyes that pleaded for pity, understanding. And lips that told nothing… ~ E. Howard Hunt

The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening. ~ Noam Chomsky

The man who goes to the top is the man who has something to say and says it when circumstances warrant. Men who keep silent underdressed are moral cowards. ~ Richard Llewellyn

The men can have a moral compass that is just unshakeable, they can have ethics that run to the core. ~ Lupe Fiasco

The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round. ~ Agnes Repplier

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege. ~ Noam Chomsky

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. ~ H.L. Mencken

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy. ~ Paul Wellstone

As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. ~ Bertrand Russell

I guess the moral of these stories is that you better recruit winners. They may not always be the so-called can't-miss-stars, but a player that expects to win and wants to win helps make a championship environment. ~ Mal Moore With Steve Townsend

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth. ~ Muhammad Asad

Moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics who faithfully go to mass deny their workers a dignified wage. ~ Isabel Allende

I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn't have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused. ~ Adrienne Brodeur

A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

If you want to know the real reasons behind that attitude, think of the thought behind that attitude ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia ~ Leo Tolstoy

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.