Conscience Quotes

Living with a conscience is like driving a car with the brakes on.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.

They’re certainly entitled to think that and… entitled to full respect for their opinions, but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain. (Richard III)

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression. My conscience is my own – my creator’s – not man’s. I shall never sink the rights of mankind to the malice – wrong or avarice of another’s wishes, though those wishes come to me in […]

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. (Hamlet)

If I am asked… how do you know that you ought to do that, of which your conscience enjoins the performance? I can only say that such is my duty. Here investigation must stop; reasoning can go no farther.

Whatever is done without ostentation, and without the people being witnesses of it, is, in my opinion, most praiseworthy: not that the public eye should be entirely avoided, for good actions desire to be placed in the light; but notwithstanding this, the greatest theater for virtue is conscience.

The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty times the devil will flee from you.