Benjamin Rush Quotes

Conscience is merely our own judgment of the right or wrong of our actions, and so can never be a safe guide unless enlightened by the word of God.

The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

The Holy Scriptures...can alone secure to society order and peace, and to our courts of justice and constitutions of government, purity, stability, and usefulness.....Bibles are strong entrenchments. Where they abound, men cannot pursue wicked courses and at the same time enjoy quiet conscience.

Conscience, that vicegerent of God in the human heart, whose "still small voice" the loudest revelry cannot drown.

I think that the Bible as a system of moral guidance in the 21st century is insufficient, to put it mildly. I feel quite strongly that we need a new moral lodestone if we can't rely on what is inside our own selves. Which I think, actually, is pretty reliable.

My conscience is captive to the Word of God

If you don't believe in God, then where is your moral barometer?

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.

Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

You people with hearts,' he said once, 'have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.

Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.

"What is my highest sense of right?" we can ask at any decision point in our lives and not worry about if this is going to lose us a lot of money or is this going to make us a lot of money or whatever.

Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

It is essential..that you should form and adopt certain rules or principles, for the government of your own conduct and temper. Unless you have such rules and principles, there will be numberless occasions on which you will have no guide for your government but your passions..It is in the Bible, you must learn them, and from the Bible how to practice them.

If Truth is taken away from us, then Right and Wrong are taken from us as well. If we don't know Right and Wrong, then we can't, we won't control ourselves, but will look to someone else to bring order through brute force and raw power. We will be controlled by a tyrant, and we will no longer be free.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.