Social Conscience Quotes

“An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ”
― Anthony Standen

“It’s not the word that’s important, it’s the right to say any word you want to and to form any sentence you want to, that’s the point and once they start to legally restrict what we can say and what we can’t say then we are on a slippery slope to authoritarianism.”

“We’re talking about racists,” said Karen.

“No one should be allowed to be racist,” said Mark.

“But that’s not down to the Government or the courts,” said Rob desperately, “that should be down to us, we should make it difficult for people to be racist, we should frown upon such language and activity, it should be by peer pressure that we stop people from being abusive and unpleasant, not down to the Government.”

“Why not?” demanded Karen, “they make the laws so it’s down to them to make the punishments.”

“It’s not about punishment,” pressed Rob, “it’s about morality and social conscience, it’s about standing up for what’s right versus moral laziness, it’s about courage versus cowardice.”
― Arun D. Ellis, Daydream Believers

“Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“The man of good heart maintained that a moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics (religious people) who faithfully go to mass (church) deny their workers a dignified wage. These words should be engraved on the thousand-peso note, so we never forget them.”
― Isabel Allende, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

“When they had gone Demelza said:' There is so much wealth in London! Did you see that- those diamonds! And yet there is so little.'
'Little what?'
'Wealth. Those faces as we came in! They would fight for a sixpence. Sometimes I think- what little I've seen, Ross - it's as if London's half at war with itself.”
― Winston Graham, The Angry Tide

“In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Tiny Tim is the personification of Scrooge's dormant conscience that he finally acknowledges and embraces in the end.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Technological prowess does not guarantee social wisdom.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Bigwig is a word Pollak uses a lot. It signifies a species he has always wrestled with and rebelled against. Saturated with indignation and profound disdain, the word stands for a power imbalance as inappropriate as it is unacceptable.”
― Hans von Trotha, Pollaks Arm

“we are all inescapably responsible, not only for our own actions, but for our lack of action, the morality and ethic of our silences and our avoidances, the shared guilt of hypocrisy, voyeurism, and cowardice; what might be called the “spectator-sport social conscience.”
― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

“The Eric Blair who finished Eton in 1921 was a naive young snob, with little knowledge of the world beyond the confines of the British middle class. His experiences in Burma, in Paris’s Latin Quarter, among England’s destitute in London and Wigan, and particularly in Catalonia developed his social conscience and honed his commitment to the twin ideals of liberty and social justice with which he remains indelibly associated.”
― Laura Beers, Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. - Albert Einstein”
― Paul Levine, Midnight Burning