Conscience Human Beings Quotes & Sayings

It comes out of human beings, it comes from the dark side of the human being, when people don't give a hoot about other people and they'll steal and rob and rob the food out of baby's mouths, so it's incumbent on every new generation to develop a social conscience and to really defend themselves. And that takes demonstrations sometimes. — Luis Valdez

Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess ... — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality ... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. — Thomas Jefferson

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires. — C.E.M. Joad

Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words? Take me, for instance. I've been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions. More words. I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeline and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. If they don't suffer, they've gotten away from me. And I've filled the world with letters to prevent their escape. I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle. I put my whole heart into these constructions. But they are constructions. — Saul Bellow

In matters of conscience and basic convictions it is unlawful and pernicious for anyone to forcibly intrude upon another's beliefs; therefore, because I am a man of rational convictions, I will not go out and demolish churches, drown monks, or rip down icons from my friends' walls because in so doing I will not spread my convictions; human beings must be educated, not coerced, I am not the enemy, I am not the tyrant of the conscience of true believers. — N.G. Pomyalovsky

Contrary to the romantic way in which our history is/has been portrayed, politicians are NOT 'men of good conscience.' In the real world, it takes a psychopath to want to rule over other human beings. Unless you want to define the word 'service' in the context of what a bull does to a cow, in no way are the efforts of politicians in this regard any kind of 'service'. — Edward Britton

It makes sense to invest in new work. It's almost like having a research department in a scientific laboratory. You have to try things out. You'll make some bad mistakes. Some things will fail but at least you'll energise the organisation. — Gavin Bryars

I've been thinking so much about how grateful I am to cover the court because the constraints of calm and civility are really palpable when you look across the street, and that, you know, I feel like the discourse has become so overheated that, you know, we talk about everything in the exact tone that seems to sort of preclude reason and to preclude the possibility of agreement. — Dahlia Lithwick

To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil. — Martha Stout

We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning. — Traudl Junge

What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?'
This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot
who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made
the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread
use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no
conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to
the people on the ground.
Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on,
and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on
people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was
welcomed to the human race. — Kurt Vonnegut

Conscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of constraint rooted in our emotional ties to one another, it prevents life from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of connectedness with an other, a bridge to someone or something outside of our often meaningless schemes. — Martha Stout

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit ... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul. — Guy De Maupassant

You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness. — Donald Miller

Rights don't come from human documents. The very idea is only worthy of contempt. Human documents are nothing but pieces of paper, they are nothing but words
until by will, and conscience, and courage, and commitment, human beings turn them into reality. — Alan Keyes

I'd always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much. — Katherine Mansfield

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power. — Neal Stephenson

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code. — C. G. Jung

A good trend following system will keep you in the market until there is evidence that the trend has changed. — Richard Dennis

We, as human beings, should wish to be loved and embraced for our character, respected and relied on for our courage, and trusted for our conscience. — Laura C. Schlessinger

I still wonder how policy officials ... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life. — Paul Rusesabagina

I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction. — Adolf Eichmann

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

Systems. They are self-evident and can easily be validated by any individual. It's almost as if these principles or natural laws are part of the human condition, part of the human consciousness, part of the human conscience. They seem to exist in all human beings, regardless of social conditioning — Stephen R. Covey

It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Human beings "belong" to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of course. "Belonging" is another way of saying: "capitulating to." — Kenny Smith

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice - all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the "good of the species" and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony. — Robert Wright

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience. — Vasily Grossman