Phil Ochs Quotes

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

We tend to think that people are more to blame for their acts than for their omissions.

The offence is, in some measure, to be tolerated in those who did it through ignorance, so it is to be rigorously punished in those who do not fear to sin knowingly

Conscience gets a lot of credit that really belongs to cowardice.

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

I was only following orders," the Mayor mocks. "The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time.

If weakness may excuse, What murderer, what traitor, parricide, Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness; that plea, therefore, With God or man will gain thee no remission.

The mind sins, not the body; if there is no intention, there is no blame.

We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.

you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

We've all made bad decisions, but they haven't always been resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well.

I find it significant that, even though contemporary philosophy tends towards forms of determinism, in the wider culture people are deeply into naming, shaming and blaming each other. So we haven't lost that sense of conscience.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

You wont hear anything from me that says I didn't kill David. I did kill him.