A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Henry David Thoreau

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Chief Conscience Conservatives Custom Immemorial Morality

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Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think that, especially among conservatives, there's a clear understanding that there are three legs to the conservative stool. There are the free-market economics conservatives, the social conservatives, and the national-security conservatives.

John Bolton

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Samuel Butler

Since time immemorial it had been the custom before a sea battle for the men to wash and don clean clothes in case of being wounded. This was all the more necessary under these circumstances, as many of them were still covered with coal dust.

Richard Hough

The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification.

Wilhelm Reich

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom.

Michel de Montaigne

The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.

Michel de Montaigne

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others.

Thomas Paine

Make friends with guilt. Guilt is a beautiful emotion that alerts us when something is wrong so that we may achieve peace with our conscience. Without conscience there would be no morality. So we can greet guilt cordially and with acceptance, just as we do all other emotions. After we respond to guilt, it has done its job and we can release it.

Glenn R. Schiraldi

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

Robert Anton Wilson

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

Frantz Fanon

I represent an emerging group of leaders within the Jewish community who are conservatives; not just fiscal conservatives, but social conservatives as well.

Adam Hasner

Suspicious.- To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.

Rajneesh

My chief aim was to combat the view that there can be no true morality without supernatural sanctions. So I argued at length that the social, or altruistic, impulses are the real source of morality, and that an ethic based on these impulses has far more claim on our allegiance than an ethic based on obedience to the commands of a God who created tapeworms and cancer-cells.

Margaret E. Knight

A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

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