Rocco Buttiglione Quotes

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

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

Obviously everybody is accountable for their own actions, and everybody has to make judgments based on their own conscience as to whether or not they believe what they were doing is right or wrong.

I have to do what's right.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

What are the values that give meaning? What is the line that you will never cross, because on this side you're good, and on this side you're evil.

Right... is the child of law.

Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That's been true from the Greeks on down.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

I think evil is very relative.

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

I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior. You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

You can't legislate morality.

There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.

I'm just doing what my conscience asks me to do.

If I do not respond to some situation, my conscience kills me. I believe in permissible violence, not necessarily non-violence.

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.'

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.