George H. W. Bush Quotes

Many people weigh the guilt, they will feel against the pleasure of the forbidden action they want to take.

If in doubt, don't. If still in doubt, do what's right.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.

The right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

You must always do what you feel is right.

I do what I think is right.

Before you do anything, you need to know if it's right or wrong.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

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.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

I have always tried my best to do what I thought was the right thing at the time.

I don't think anyone sets out to do something bad, it's just that it's very difficult.

We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

It's easy to get into the grey zone [of ethics].

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

I don't know how to play evil.

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.