Vernon Howard Quotes

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

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

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

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

If the Soviet Government orders me to act against my conscience, I do not obey …. Conscience is above the law. No law which is against the conscience can bind.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

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 difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

You cannot do wrong and feel right. It is impossible!

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

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.'

What a man calls his 'conscience' is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.