Robert Southey Quotes

There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.

If our inner being was to be turned to the outside, and our outer being turned inward, we would appear with more wounds and diseases than the Prophet Job. For each sin that we commit and each doubt that enters our mind causes wounds in our heart and our spirit.

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

I really wanted to be nasty and mean and bad. It's so much easier than being the good girl.

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.

A bad guy always assumes he's going to win, whereas the good guy has to struggle with, what if I lose?, and the audience wants to struggle with him.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

The good die young, because they see it's no use living if you have got to be good.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

That which is morally wrong will never be politically right.

I'm not an evil person. Nobody's really evil.

Whenever you try to break God's moral law, you end up breaking yourself and hurting others - all while proving His law in the process.

Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs.

Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

There is no way to kill a man's righteousness but by his own consent.

Whatever the consequences of staying true to yourself, they're much less than the consequences of selling your soul.

Virtue is its own punishment.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

The surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves.

Is it less dishonest to do what is wrong because it is not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.

Justice is following the divine design in all that one does, and bringing back into the divine design things that have fallen away from that design. Justice is the divine design itself.

If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.

So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Nothing deters a good man from doing what is honourable.