#conscience

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#courage #majority #minority #truth #courage

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. ↗

— Jim Carroll

#conscience #death #ghosts #poetry #death

Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men...? ↗

— St. Athanasius of Alexandria

#death #faith #incarnation #jesus #life

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, eve, and low methods. ↗

— Joe Abercrombie

#evil #men #violence #design

Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them. ↗

— Jeff Lindsay

#conscience #dreams

There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#freedom

The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good. ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#compulsion #conscience #faith #individual #liberal

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt. ↗

— George Sewell

#fear #guilt #pays #tax

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive. ↗

— George Eliot

#dogma #mistake #science #life

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

#life