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In a word: Conscience
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Published Wednesday, August 07, 2013 @ 12:58 AM EDT
Aug 07 2013

A clear conscience needs no public information officer. (from The New York Times)
-Unattributed

A conscience which has been bought once will be bought twice.
-Norbert Weiner

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
-Doug Larson

A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.
-Jane Austen

A person may sometimes have a clear conscience simply because his head is empty.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A reformer is one who insists on his conscience being your guide.
-Millard Miller

A satellite has no conscience.
-Edward R. Murrow

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
-H.L. Mencken

Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
-Hermann Hesse

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
-Albert Camus

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
-George Bernard Shaw

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
-Oscar Wilde

Conscience does make cowards of us all.
-William Shakespeare

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

Conscience is a small inner voice that doesn't speak your language.
-Unattributed

Conscience is better served by a myth.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.
-H.L. Mencken

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-Sigmund Freud

Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinion of others.
-Sir Henry Taylor

Conscience places a bridle upon the tongue.
-Publilius Syrus

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
-Paul Valery

Conscious is when you are aware of something, and conscience is when you wish you weren't.
-Unattributed

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Did anyone ever wrestle with his conscience and lose?
-Mort Sahl

Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
-John Milton

I am a conscientious man. When I throw rocks at seabirds, I leave no tern unstoned.
-Ogden Nash

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.
-Lillian Hellman

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 experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.
-Theodore Parker

I don't think you can make a lawyer honest by an act of legislature. You've got to work on his conscience. And his lack of conscience is what makes him a lawyer.
-Will Rogers

I have faith in the universe, for it is rational. Law underlies each happening. And I have faith in my purpose here on earth. I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time- here and now.
-Albert Einstein

I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.
-Woodrow Wilson

In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.
-Felix Frankfurter

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.
-George Washington

Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
-Albert Einstein

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.
-Theodore Parker

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now that women have been more or less freed by the three C's- cars, can-openers, and contraceptives- it seems too bad that the fourth one, conscience, so often has to butt in.
-Peg Bracken

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil," it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
-Sydney J. Harris

Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain. It is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
-C.S. Lewis

People who wrestle with their consciences usually go for two falls out of three.
-Unattributed

Reason deceives use often; conscience never.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
-Henry Wheeler Shaw

Temptation is the voice of the suppressed evil; conscience is the voice of the repressed good.
-J.A. Hadfield

The Anglo-Saxon conscience doesn't keep you from doing anything. It just keeps you from enjoying it.
-Salvador de Madaringa

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.
-E.B. White

The conscience is a thousand witnesses.
-Richard Taverner

The good conscience of the wicked rest on all the villainies they refrain form committing.
-Stephen Vizinczey

The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man.
-James Madison

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
-Omar Bradley

There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience.
-Stokely Carmichael

There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.
-St. Ambrose

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.
-Ogden Nash

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
-Joseph Conrad

To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation"- this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
-Aldous Huxley

Tyrants have no consciences, and reformers no feeeling; and the world suffers both by the plague and by the cure.
-Horace Walpole

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-Adam Smith

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
-John F. Kennedy

We lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
-Aldous Huxley

What we call conscience, in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the constable.
-Christian Bovee

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.
-Jack Kevorkian


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