Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I don't tend to think in terms of a moral authority - be a good boy, do good things - more in terms of what feels right.

I follow my conscience - and this is upsetting to some people, but I maintain the conscience is going to be the only thing between us and communication in the future.

Conscience is known to be adequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.

I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right.

Leaders can be moral-and they should be moral-without imposing their morality on others.

If you act in the name of conscience you are stronger than any government in the world.

Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided.

It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it.

Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

A good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself which the neglect of legislators had forgotten to supply.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. [...] The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. [...] To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.

Conscience, like a child, is soon lulled to sleep.

A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.

Some persons follow the dictates of their conscience only in the same sense in which a coachman may be said to follow the horses he is driving.

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

Do what you know is right, but try not to get caught.