Martha Gellhorn Quotes

There’s nothing more important than people’s conscience and there’s nothing that needs more protection.

I have learned that a clear conscience, or a legal opinion, does not make you ethically bullet proof.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

A person may be qualified to do greater good to mankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.

Be more careful of your conscience than of your estate. The latter can be bought and sold; the former never.

I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth, and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another: only the absolutely right is expedient for all.

Integrity is the factor that determines which one will prevail. We struggle daily with situations that demand decisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Integrity establishes the ground rules for resolving these tensions. it determines who we are and how we will respond before the conflict even appears. Integrity welds what we say, think, and do, into a whole person so that permission is never granted for one of these to be out of sync.

I do what I think is right.

The point never to lose sight of is to be guided by the correct thing, as you see it. It's the only way to approach such profound matters and retain your integrity.

I would never sacrifice my individual beliefs as a citizen to my corporate responsibilities.

I should not deal with things that aren't founded on ethical principles, because that's not who I am as a human being.

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

We don't claim to have perfect morals, but at least we have a huge area of things that, while legal, are beneath us. We won't do them. Currently, there's a culture in Americathat says that anything that won't send you to prison is OK.

For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

Conscience is a judge in every man's breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, and perhaps the only incorrupt thing about him; yet, inflexible and honest as this judge is (however polluted the bench on which he sits), no man can, in my opinion, enjoy any applause which is not there adjudged to be his due.

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe

I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

It is neither safe nor prudent to do anything against conscience.

Honor was never taking the easy way when it was also the wrong one. Never telling a falsehood unless the truth was painful and unnecessary, or a lie was necessary to save others. Never manipulating the truth to serve only yourself. Protecting the weak and helpless; standing fast even when fear made you weak. Keeping your word.

The great theatre for virtue is conscience.