[T]he tribal conscience ought for the sake of social welfare to be stronger than private interest...
Character Quotes
Anyone else on this page has about a third as many entries as Shakespeare. Next come Pope, Milton, James Russell Lowell and Goethe. The sentence worth reading in context is Emerson’s, from The American Scholar (1837): character is higher than intellect, and a great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
Shaw, in Man and Superman (1903), is here for a remark about marriage and morality, which shows how loosely the page’s topic is applied.
Three entries are flagged. Two sayings credited to the Roman mime-writer Publilius Syrus, one about character deciding every man’s fortune and one about doing nothing at once both hastily and prudently, are disputed. A passage credited to Joseph Addison, about imperfection being what complains of the imperfect, is marked misattributed.
I leave with a very clear conscience knowing that in a modest way I have done my part for the party
... ; but conscience, like a child, is soon lulled to sleep ; and habit is our idea of eternity.
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.
It's only by the hard blows of adverse fortune that character is tooled.