James Freeman Clarke Quotes

Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.

The courage of New England was the courage of conscience.

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

The greatest want of the world is the want of men - men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.

At the end of the day, you have to do what you think is right and be human.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

It takes courage to have a conscience when you seem to see others getting something tangible out of not bothering to struggle with the morality of a situation. It gets frustrating and demoralizing. This is precisely where character comes in. All throughout history special people have felt compelled to do what they objectively saw as right and good - even in the face of humiliation or rejection or expulsion or torture or death. That is because they believed that certain ideas were more important than individual well-being.

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

I want to be able, as days go by, always to look myself straight in the eye.

Courage is not always about action. It takes courage to do nothing rather than do something that you do not believe in or understand.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Just because people are in authority, if it doesn't seem right, don't do it. If it violates your own principles, don't do it.

There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.

A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.

You have to do what is real and what is right and what is good and what you believe in. It doesn't mean it's always going to work. It doesn't. But when it does, it is truthful and forever.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Conscience? Great souls do not worry themselves with such little details

The issue is not whether or not we can stand with the President. It is whether, at the end of the day, we can stand with ourselves.