Social Conscience 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

There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative. — Robert Winston

I grew up at a time where I think most people had a social and political conscience. Some of the biggest changes in our country's political history happened at the time I was growing up, so I was raised to be a part of those things and to participate and I will continue to do that as much as I can. — George Clooney

Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban. — Charles Platt

The Latin American cause is about all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge. — Eduardo Galeano

Perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Since the time of the ancient Greeks a democracy has depended on its philosophers and creative artists. It can only flourish by continuous probing, prodding, and questioning of the social conditions under which man exists and tries to better himself. One of the first moves of a dictatorship is to stifle the artists and thinkers who have the ability to stir up dissent from any prescribed dogma which might enslave them. Because the artist can arouse the curiosity and conscience of his community, he becomes a threat to those who have taken power. — Uta Hagen

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn't have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project. — Jacque Fresco

Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. — Theodore Roosevelt

What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the "social character" suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction. — Erich Fromm

In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war. — Michael Chabon

The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern. — Ronald Reagan

Starbucks trying to build a different kind of company around the balance of profitably and benevolence. A social conscience. And that isn't a program it has to be a way of life. — Howard Schultz

Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration. — Llewellyn Rockwell

The commitment to enlarged thought is morally and politically significant in that it fosters the 'ability to think without rules', to cultivate judgement and conscience capable of thinking through the purposes and consequences of our actions from different perspectives, without proceeding in automatic fashion through obedience to pre-existing social conventions. — Patrick Hayden

What manner of mind considers this holy estate [pregnancy] which women are privileged by the Almighty to attain as a slur upon the social conscience? — Grantly Dick-Read

An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. — Anthony Standen

Today social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of the world. The abyss between those who are within the world 'order' and those who are excluded is widening day by day. The use of leading-edge technologies has made it possible to accumulate wealth in a way that is fantastic but perverse because it is unjustly distributed. Twenty-percent of humankind control eighty percent of all means of life. That fact creates a dangerous imbalance in the movement of history. — Leonardo Boff

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. — George Santayana

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I have a lot of trouble understanding all the detail of finance and administration - but if you combine intellectual and professional capacity with a social conscience, you can change things: countries, structures, economic models, colonial states. — Evo Morales

When you're poor and hungry and frightened of failure, you often don't have the luxury of high values, lofty goals, and social conscience. Funny how fear and poverty will acid-wash your value set, burn away all the flimflam and artifice and learned morality and leave you with nothing but the urgency of survival. - Dr. Dan Trix - Chasing the Horizon. — Rodney Romig

Happy people create happiness; it's the most contagious energy on Earth. Fearful, sad, angry, or miserable people only tend to spread these same qualities, even if working in the name of social conscience. — Dan Millman

That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience.. — Adam Hochschild

The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire. — Nicholas D. Kristof

As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality. — Anna Brownell Jameson

Psychiatry doesn't heal, it controls, and it doesn't deal with the soul, but with the brain. It is the ultimate weapon against spiritual conscience, when the educational system and the social structure seem to fail in producing functional slaves. — Daniel Marques

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land — Aldo Leopold

Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society. — Emile Durkheim

Ultimately a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense or conscience. — Charles Darwin

The U.N. acts as the world's conscience, and over eighty-five percent of the work that is done by the United Nations is in the social, economic, educational and cultural fields. — Shirley Temple

As citizens, we knew we had ceded some of our individual rights to society in order to live together as a community. But we did not believe this social contract included support for an immoral system. Since the people invested government with its authority, we understood that we had to obey the law. But when law became suppressive and tyrannical, when human law violated divine principles, we felt it was not only our right, but our duty to disobey. As Henry Thoreau strongly believed, to comply with an unjust system is to accept abuse. It is not the role of the citizen to follow the government down a path that violates his or her own conscience. — John Lewis

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time. — Rod Serling

When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism. — Kathryn Bigelow

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It's because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand - demand - demand change. — Joe Biden

With the passing of time, as well as the 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. — Jose Saramago

Normally leaving one's country is a grave step: it involves leaving the society and culture in which we have been raised,, the society and culture whose language we use in speech and thought to express and understand ourselves, our aims, goals and values; the society and culture, customs, and conventions we depend on to find our place in the social world. In large part, we affirm our society and culture, and have an intimate and inexpressible knowledge of it, even though much of it we may question, if not reject. The government's authority cannot, then be freely accepted in the sense that the bonds of society and culture, of history and social place of origin, begin so early to shape our life and are normally so strong that the right of emigration does not suffice to make accepting its authority free, politically speaking, in the way that liberty of conscience suffices to make accepting ecclesiastical authority free. — John Rawls

Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations. — Frank Herbert

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life. — Benjamin Disraeli

I found myself starting architecture with a deep social, Jewish, liberal conscience, and the belief that architecture is for the people. It was a do-gooder base; I was born and raised that way. I was for blacks, whites, Italians, Poles, whatever. — Frank Gehry

Most people develop their social conscience when young, during that brief period between leaving school and deciding that injustice isn't necessarily all bad, and — Terry Pratchett

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

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority. — Stanley Milgram

Sluts and losers are tolerable to my friends. But a person with a social conscience is from Pluto. — Melina Marchetta

People don't know I've got a deep social conscience. I'm a child of the Depression, born in 1933. My parents were very liberal in their social views. — Eli Broad

Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That's Rule Three to a robot. Also every 'good' human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom - even when they interfere with his comfort or his safety. That's Rule Two to a robot. Also, every 'good' human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That's Rule One to a robot. To put it simply - if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man. — Isaac Asimov

Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn't a whim, wasn't an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a monster. — Louise Penny

Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious! — David Eddings

My first professional acting job was in 'Hair' during the Vietnam War. So I think I've always been drawn to projects with a social conscience. — Clarke Peters

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

Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment - originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.18 — Jonathan Haidt

I have no idea why she quieted down on the subject. Maybe she was told to. I can imagine that it wasn't a very popular position in the Administration, with her own husband having ordered by executive order the internment. Maybe she was just told: "Look, we're in a war now. Turn off your social conscience." — William A. Rusher

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin. — Nikolai Berdyaev

The ancient lizard mind lies below the mammalian mind, which lies below a primate mind, which is modified by a mind adapted to language, and since these layers have developed in response to differing evolutionary pressures, they often do not function efficiently together. Human civility tries to control ape dominance, human rationality tries to control mammalian sexuality, human social conscience tries to ameliorate reptilian greed, never with total success. — Sheri S. Tepper

A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one. — Irvine Welsh

There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience. — Joe Wright

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

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it ...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did. — Howard Zinn

There isn't one single thing that will end unwinding. It will take a hodgepodge of random events that come together in just the right way and at just the right time to remind society it's got a conscience. -Sonia — Neal Shusterman

Women are the social conscience of a country. They hold our societies together. — Rajiv Gandhi

No. Your crime has no conscience. You haven't been driven to do it by some oppressive social
force. How I hate to be reasonable. You're not against the rich. Nobody's against the rich. Everybody's
ten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought. No. Your crime is in your head. Another fool
shooting up a diner because because — Don DeLillo

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.
He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda. — James Jones

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

[Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was
above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion
rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity's history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy. — David Bentley Hart

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears. — Jose Saramago

In restating this basic Christian doctrine, Benedict argues that it is not only for Christians alone. Others may not share the Christian faith in God, but the Christian proclamation that hope comes from within the person- in the realm of faith and conscience - is for them too. It offers an important protection against stifling and occasionally brutal social systems built on false hopes that come from outside the person, founded on political idealogies, economic models and social theories. — Raymond J. De Souza

When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective ... There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction, and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Science and education, when devoid of a social conscience or environmental and human concern, are meaningless. — Jacque Fresco

In terms of legacy, I'm not sure that I see some great historic deposit there, as a result of her passing our way. She heightened the sense of social conscience in the New Deal generally. To her great credit, she was early on the side of the blacks in their fight for civil rights. She had a tendency to participate, which easily oozed over into meddlesomeness. — William A. Rusher

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable - namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. — Charles Darwin

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is a fact that, in the West, we live in a capitalist society, but that does not mean that we cannot be guided by the idea of a social conscience in our work. Yes, fashion design requires consumers to consume, but we can do our bit for society by running our companies in a socially responsible way, and by creating products that promote respect for social and environmental issues. There is also the possibility for power and influence to be a force for change. — Giorgio Armani

The success of the Starbucks has been based on this balance between profitability and a social conscience. Everywhere we're doing business, were trying to manage the business through the lens of humanity. — Howard Schultz

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply: "That is because our barricade is made of good intentions. — Victor Hugo

The more people come together, the more borders will be opened and people and opinions get together, the more unrenouncable tolerance will be a fundamental part of our social life. Without tolerance there is no religious liberty, no freedom of conscience and no freedom of thought. — Thomas Klestil

Waiving the rights of conscience, not included in the surrender implied by the social state, & more or less invaded by all Religious establishments, the simple question to be decided, is whether a support of the best & purest religion, the Christian religion itself ought not, so far at least as pecuniary means are involved, to be provided for by the Government, rather than be left to the voluntary provisions of those who profess it. — James Madison

We were a country band with a social conscience. — Kinky Friedman

When I first began acting, I assumed an intellectual responsibility attached to my profession, which I had accepted for a long time. My father taught me that an actor had to have a social and political conscience, and that the work that he does has to reflect from that. — Christopher Reeve

The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries...
"Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society. — Norman F. Cantor

Who thinks, I'm going to cheat on my girlfriend, but I've got too much of a social conscience to leave my condom wrapper on the floor - heaven forbid I litter. — Penny Reid

You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word. — Elizabeth Bibesco

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied. — John Fraser

I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand
they only. Know this at last. — Charlotte Bronte

I think you have a social responsibility as the villain, which is pretty different from the hero's responsibility. If you have any kind of a social or political conscience at all, the first thing you want to do is make malevolence recognizable to people, almost as a kind of teaching aid. — Peter Coyote

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life. — Stefan Molyneux

Before God and in conscience, Muslims cannot satisfy themselves by repeating what the texts say and then snap their fingers at daily social realities: that would be to speak of an ideal while at the same time blind themselves as to their daily betrayal. — Tariq Ramadan

As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish
about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives. — Robertson Davies

We should give to our rulers, our sires and sons no rest until all our rights - social, civil and political - are fully accorded. How are men to know what we want unless we tell them? They have no idea that our wants, material and spiritual, are the same as theirs; that we love justice, liberty and equality as well as they do; that we believe in the principles of self-government, in individual rights, individual conscience and judgment, the fundamental ideas of the Protestant religion and republican government. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. — Thomas Jefferson

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity. — Jonathan Miller

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience. — Walter Lippmann

Thus the conscience, though it may lead the unsaved man aright in some areas, cannot save him, since it is defiled, seared, and evil. But in regeneration it is cleansed and used by the Lord to guide the believer in his political, vocational, spiritual, and social relations. — Charles C. Ryrie

As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white. — James P. Comer

The proper task of social reform is to remove poverty from society and to ensure that people do not sell their conscience to make a living. — Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. — Jon Ronson

There is direct correlation between a society lacking in artistic vision to lack of social conscience, i.e., crime, poverty, and senseless, violent atrocities, materialism. — Vanna Bonta

You know what scholars are like; no conscience at all when it comes to their own field, let alone a sense of social delicacy. — Diana Gabaldon

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist. — Joseph McCabe

In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population. The products of the opposing two vectors in natural selection are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection. — Edward O. Wilson

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