Philip Zimbardo Quotes

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.

Guilt soon learns to lie.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

If we cannot be powerful and happy and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.

Everybody is a sinner before God. And I think we magnify it today because we have television, and we have so many other technologies that make what happens in some other part of the world in our living room.

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

Actually, I think you're more stymied playing the good guy than you are the bad guy. As the bad guy, you have no inhibitions. Nothing stops you from doing what it is you feel you have to do. You do it because it's what's required. I have to protect my goddess, as best as I can.

Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.

Thank God he killed the guy. Oh, now, wait a minute. What kind of a prayer was that!

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

The path of duty I clearly trace, / I stand with conscience face to face, / And all her pleas allow; / Calling and crying the while for grace, - / 'Some other time, and some other place; / Oh, not to-day; not now!

We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience.

Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.

People who expect to feel guilty tend to be more sympathetic, to put themselves into other people's shoes, to think about the consequences of their behaviour before acting, and to treasure their morals. As a result they are less prone to lie, cheat or behave immorally when they conduct a business deal or spot an opportunity to make money, studies suggest. They are also likely to make better employees because people who think less about the future results of their actions are more likely to be late, to steal or to be rude to clients.

... in a wicked way, it is an incentive to good living to observe the spice of enjoyment there is to a godly soul in a very little sin.

You feel the intense desire to do good, to do right thing. At this stage, you also feel helpless.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.

Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.