A Quote by B. C. Forbes

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

B. C. Forbes

Quote Topics

Failure Conscience Cost He Man His Man Millions

Quote Author

B. C. Forbes
Scottish - Journalist
May 14, 1880 - May 6, 1954

A magazine editor recently asked me to sit down on my 40th birthday and write an article on the most important things I had learned in my first 40 years. I told him that the chief thing I had learned was that the copybook maxims are true, but that too many people forget this once they go out into the heat and hustle and bustle of the battle of life and only realize their truth once one foot is beginning to slip into the grave. The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

B. C. Forbes

A man with a machine may murder or enslave millions, whereas it used to take at least thousands to murder millions. And the man behind the machine has nothing on his conscience.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Another doctrine repugnant to Civill Society, is that whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne ; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of Good and Evill. For a man's Conscience and his Judgement are the same thing, and as the Judgement, so also the Conscience may be erroneous.

Thomas Hobbes

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Gaston Bachelard

Martin Luther King challenged the conscience of my generation, and his words and his legacy continue to move generations to action today at home and around the world. His love and faith is alive in millions of Americans who volunteer each day in soup kitchens or in schools, or who refused to ignore the suffering of millions they'd never met in far-away places when a tsunami brought unthinkable destruction. His vision and his passion is alive in churches and on campuses when millions stand up against the injustice of discrimination anywhere, or the indifference that leaves too many behind.

John F. Kerry

Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.

Jonathan Swift

We may gamble on outsmarting the law; we may even gamble on the leniency of man and the mercy of God-but no man ever won a gamble with his own conscience. Even should he think he has beaten his conscience into submission, his misdeeds still leave their mark upon him. Anyone who gambles against this fact has already lost his gamble.

Sidney Greenberg

What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.

Jane Addams

True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

Henry David Thoreau

It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.

Arthur Conan Doyle

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

Joseph Conrad

Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.

James Freeman Clarke

The few pounds we spend for an item of clothing isn't the true cost - the real cost is the millions of gallons of clean water that was used to grow the fabric, or the millions of gallons of fresh water that was polluted with toxic chemicals to dye the clothes.

Stacey Dooley

What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience.