Crisis Of Conscience Quotes

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?”... The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of great crisis and controversy.

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Some people, from what I've seen, boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they're lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen ... Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These'll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the like they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie'll appear a some kind of concession, a settlement with through. That type's mercifully easy to see through ... Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that's how you can always tell ... So Now I've established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on.

He felt a swelling of pride. Ridiculous, of course. He had endangered the kindgdom — how would people react if they knew the Blackthorn himself had broken before a crisis of conscience? They'd laugh. In that moment, he didn't care. So long as he could be a hero to this woman

Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

And two types of people,” he goes on, completely unfazed. “There’s the one that will walk past that offending piece of lint or paper on the floor every single day and tell themselves they’ll get to it. And those that will pick it up the minute they spot it. They’ll figure out where it came from, trash it, and forget it was ever there. But, for the ones that walk by it every day, it will become a problem. It will start to fester. Another something they’ll have to get to. Another pea on their plate. They’ll start to look for it, its presence a nuisance, and tell themselves they’ll get to it tomorrow. Until one day, it’s more of a crisis of conscience than a pea.” “Let me guess. You don’t have any peas on your plate.” One side of his mouth lifts in contempt before he speaks through thick lips. “I fucking hate peas.” “It’s a piece of lint.” “Only to the person who picked it up.

Sometimes people have come to a crisis of conscience, perhaps having lived much of their lives without any time for God, and have then tried to twist God’s arm to be nice to them after all. That’s a poor substitute for genuine worship and love of God – though God remains gracious and merciful, and ready to welcome people however muddled they may be.

This, to be sure, is not the entire truth. For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. They could be found everywhere, in all strata of society, among the simple people as well as among the educated, in all parties, perhaps even in the ranks of the N.S.D.A.P. Very few of them were known publicly, as were the aforementioned Reck-Malleczewen or the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may also have been such persons among the members of the resistance, but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints, and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element manifest itself publicly: this was when the Scholls, two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a “mass murderer.

I wish I knew where this journey will take us, but I don't. All I know is that this is bigger than me, my self-doubt, or any crisis of conscience. I now truly realize how profoundly insignificant I am compared to all this. Why does that make me feel so much better?

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.

I began the pursuit of my vocation as a member of the Established Church,” says Reverend Verringer, “but then had a crisis of conscience. Surely the light of God’s word and grace is available to those outside the Church of England, and through more direct means than the Liturgy.

Democracy is people-approved dictatorship, Military is people-approved genocide. Atom bombs are people-approved armageddon, In conscience-court all guilty of homicide.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.474

I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. Then - but I don't know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape.

The faculty member is the student’s natural enemy and if he lets down his guard he is sorry for it later, has a conscience crisis, and feels he has to turn you in. Unless he has prejudiced his own case so badly that he doesn’t wish to call administrative attention to what now appears to be a mutual folly; in this case sullen silence ensues. You may have been teacher’s pet before the weekend, but try to get an A in the course after Monday. Just try it. This is known as academic integrity.

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.

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

Any obstruction of the natural processes of development... or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age; takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later on the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to an illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety - a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.

Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words. But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler.

within twenty-four hours some of the main banks were facing ruin, the Government intervened to plead for calm and to appeal to the civic conscience of citizens, ending the proclamation with the solemn declaration that it would assume all the responsibilities and duties resulting from this public calamity they were facing, but this calming measure did not succeed in alleviating the crisis, not only because people continued to go blind but also because those who could still see were only interested in saving their precious money,

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of great crisis and controversy.

We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay—and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime—such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext.

C’est bien là, en effet, le caractère le plus visible de l’époque moderne : besoin d’agitation incessante, de changement continuel, de vitesse sans cesse croissante comme celle avec laquelle se déroulent les événements eux-mêmes. C’est la dispersion dans la multiplicité, et dans une multiplicité qui n’est plus unifiée par la conscience d’aucun principe supérieur ; c’est, dans la vie courante comme dans les conceptions scientifiques, l’analyse poussée à l’extrême, le morcellement indéfini, une véritable désagrégation de l’activité humaine dans tous les ordres où elle peut encore s’exercer ; et de là l’inaptitude à la synthèse, l’impossibilité de toute concentration, si frappante aux yeux des Orientaux.

Unspoken Truths (The Sonnet) Democracy is people-approved dictatorship, Military is people-approved genocide. Atom bombs are people-approved armageddon, In conscience-court all guilty of homicide. There is no time left, for there never was time, Time begins with the beginning of civilization. And civilization is something we are yet to find, Hence, there is no question of clock progression. Nationalist chimps sell war in the name of security, Stoneage civilians rush to bulk-buy graveyard plots. Merchant of murder, you, yell about peacekeeping, While you feast on nationalism like wet little cods! When cavemen take pride in their national glory of death, Sanctuary becomes asylum for the lunatic walking dead!

The totalitarian systems warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the inevitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies, an extreme offshoot of its own development, and an ominous product of its own expansion. They are a deeply informative reflection of its own crisis. Totalitarian regimes are not merely dangerous neighbors and even less some kind of an avant-garde of world progress. Alas, just the opposite: they are the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global. They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world.

With indifference people are continuously breeding a society full of disparity – they are constantly aiding the creation of more inequality. We are constantly making way for a world where some parents give their kids x-box to soothe them, for their birthday, and many more parents are forced to use leftover cardboard boxes as cradle for their babies because they don't even have a roof over their head. This is our so called civilization - this is our so called modern humanity - shame on us - shame on us as a species - shame on us as civilized beings - shame on us as thinking and breathing individuals of conscience. No more - no more - we must break this disparity - and we must do it right now - and we are not going to do it by fighting over whose ideology is the best - we are going to do it only by taking actual responsibility of our society - by taking actual responsibility of the world - we are going to do it by acting as a living cure for those disparities, by using our own resources as means to erase those gaps however we can. Only with action born from our heart can we end disparity, not with talks of argument and inaction of complacency.

[...] Pourtant, s’il n’existe pas de moyen infaillible pour permettre au futur disciple d’identifier un Maître authentique par une procédure mentale uniquement, il existe néanmoins cette maxime ésotérique universelle (127) que tout aspirant trouvera un guide authentique s’il le mérite. De même que cette autre maxime qu’en réalité, et en dépit des apparences, ce n’est pas celui qui cherche qui choisit la voie, mais la voie qui le choisit. En d’autres termes, puisque le Maître incarne la voie, il a, mystérieusement et providentiellement, une fonction active à l’égard de celui qui cherche, avant même que l’initiation établisse la relation maître-disciple. Ce qui permet de comprendre l’anecdote suivante, racontée par le Shaykh marocain al-’Arabî ad-Darqâwî (mort en 1823), l’un des plus grands Maîtres soufis de ces derniers siècles. Au moment en question, il était un jeune homme, mais qui représentait déjà son propre Shaykh, ’Alî al-Jamal, à qui il se plaignit un jour de devoir aller dans tel endroit où il craignait de ne trouver aucune compagnie spirituelle. Son Shaykh lui coupa la parole : « Engendre celui qu’il te faut! » Et un peu plus tard, il lui réitéra le même ordre, au pluriel : « Engendre-les! »(128) Nous avons vu que le premier pas dans la voie spirituelle est de « renaître »; et toutes ces considérations laissent entendre que nul ne « mérite » un Maître sans avoir éprouvé une certaine conscience d’« inexistence » ou de vide, avant-goût de la pauvreté spirituelle (faqr) d’où le faqîr tire son nom. La porte ouverte est une image de cet état, et le Shaykh ad-Darqâwî déclare que l’un des moyens les plus puissants pour obtenir la solution à un problème spirituel est de tenir ouverte « la porte de la nécessité »(129) et de prendre garde qu’elle ne se referme. On peut ainsi en déduire que ce « mérite » se mesurera au degré d’acuité du sens de la nécessité chez celui qui cherche un Maître, ou au degré de vacuité de son âme, qui doit être en effet suffisamment vide pour précipiter l’avènement de ce qui lui est nécessaire. Et soulignons pour terminer que cette « passivité » n’est pas incompatible avec l’attitude plus active prescrite par le Christ : « Cherchez et vous trouverez; frappez et l’on vous ouvrira », puisque la manière la plus efficace de « frapper » est de prier, et que supplier est la preuve d’un vide et l’aveu d’un dénuement, d’une « nécessité » justement. En un mot, le futur disciple a, aussi bien que le Maître, des qualifications à actualiser. 127. Voir, dans le Treasury of Traditional Wisdom de Whitall Perry, à la section réservée au Maître spirituel, pp. 288-95, les citations sur ce point particulier, de même que sur d’autres en rapport avec cet appendice. 128. Lettres d'un Maître soufi, pp. 27-28. 129. Ibid., p. 20. - Le texte dit : « porte de la droiture », erreur de traduction corrigée par l’auteur, le terme arabe ayant bien le sens de « nécessité », et même de « besoin urgent ». (NdT)

Even if the whole world turns against you, until you agree, no failure, no crisis, no obscurity can win over you.

Hope in the Form of a Creative Minority Rabbi Sacks made that observation in a discussion of the notion of a “creative minority”—a concept that then-Cardinal Ratzinger had popularized before his election as Peter’s successor. The German cardinal had advanced the thesis that the Church is most effective when her people act as a creative minority in society, not achieving authority over society, but acting as a restraint on those who govern and pricking the consciences of those in power. The Church of the early twenty-first century, visibly losing prestige and influence, was probably destined to become a creative minority once again, Cardinal Ratzinger said. In Faith and the Future, he wrote: From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. This smaller Church would no longer feel the siren call of human respect. Indeed, the creative minority would emerge because of a willingness to flout the standards of a secular society. Belonging to this Church would mean forfeiting any hope of social climbing; it would mean a life of skirmishing against convention. “As a small society,” Cardinal Ratzinger said, the Church “will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.” When he described his vision of the Church as a creative minority, Cardinal Ratzinger was not overly sanguine about the practical consequences for the faithful. The Church would be poor, the Faith would be disdained, and the faithful would suffer, he predicted. In this way, however, the Church would be better conformed to Jesus Christ. Thus he concluded, “But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.

In this world, we walk beneath a sun that has spots on it, and we do so with no conflict of conscience over the matter. Similarly, where is the human organization that is free from defect, or the church that is infallible in faith or practice? It does not, and never will, exist in this life.

for Americans to have the benefit of conservative principles, we must once again have the benefit of truly conservative leadership. Unabashed, unafraid, unreserved conservative leadership. But almost two decades into the new century, we conservatives have suffered a crisis of confidence, which in turn has led to a crisis of principle. In the election campaign of 2016, it was as if we no longer had the courage of our convictions and so chose to simply abandon conviction altogether, taking up instead an unfamiliar banner and a new set of values that had never been our own. That an enigmatic Republican nominee succeeded in becoming president resolves nothing in terms of the future of American conservatism. In fact, an enigma by definition is a riddle, and riddles are meant to be solved.

Just as the availability of vast computational power drives the implementation of global surveillance, so its logic has come to dictate how we respond to it, and to other existential threats to our cognitive and physical well-being. The demand for some piece of evidence that will allow us to assert some hypothesis with 100 per cent certainty overrides our ability to act in the present. Consensus - such as the broad scientific agreement around the urgency of the climate crisis - is disregarded in the face of the smallest quantum of uncertainty. We find ourselves locked in a kind of stasis, demanding that Zeno's arrow hit the target even as the atmosphere before it warms and thickens. The insistence upon some ever-insufficient confirmation creates the deep strangeness of the present moment: everybody knows what's going on, and nobody can do anything about it. Reliance on the computational logics of surveillance to derive truth about the world leaves us in a fundamentally precarious and paradoxical position. Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty. It is also purely reactive, permitting action only after sufficient evidence has been gathered and forbidding action in the present when it is most needed. The operation of surveillance, and our complicity in it, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of the new dark age, because it insists on a kind of blind vision: everything is illuminated, but nothing is seen. We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it. But the light of computation just as easily renders us powerless - either through information overload, or a false sense of security. It is a lie we have been sold by the seductive power of computational thinking. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority. Surveillance does not work, and neither does righteous exposure. There is no final argument to be made on either side, no clinching statement that will ease our conscience and change the minds of our opponents. There is no smoking gun, no total confirmation or clear denial. The Glomar response, rather than the dead words of a heedless bureaucracy, turns out to be the truest description of the world that we can articulate.

In The Kuzari, written around 1140, the medieval Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi imagined a dialogue between a rabbi and a pagan king. At one point, the rabbi extols the morality of the Jews. Unlike the Christian world—which according to Jewish tradition is called Edom (red) because it is soaked with blood—the Jews, he declares, have held themselves to a higher standard. But the king is unconvinced. Jewish morality, he insists, is merely the byproduct of Jewish weakness. “If you had the power,” he retorts, “you would slay.” In Israel, we have our answer to the king. We can finally know whether the ethical traditions that so often made diaspora Jews the conscience of their nations can survive now that Jews have a nation of their own.

Wield your will like a time-space instrument, Jump-start the world with your photons of conscience.

There are two types of ways to handle problems,” he starts, and I roll my eyes dismissively. “Great, another lecture.” “And two types of people,” he goes on, completely unfazed. “There’s the one that will walk past that offending piece of lint or paper on the floor every single day and tell themselves they’ll get to it. And those that will pick it up the minute they spot it. They’ll figure out where it came from, trash it, and forget it was ever there. But, for the ones that walk by it every day, it will become a problem. It will start to fester. Another something they’ll have to get to. Another pea on their plate. They’ll start to look for it, its presence a nuisance, and tell themselves they’ll get to it tomorrow. Until one day, it’s more of a crisis of conscience than a pea.

I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The questions presupposes that whoever asks this has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is no Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, energy, background and political development among individual men involved, and bearing in mind that two of them (White and Wadleigh) were not Communists, but fellow travelers, the answer to the questions must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party. And of the fellow travelers who co-operate to the point of espionage, it must be observed that in effect they have become Communists, whatever fictive differences they may maintain. Faced with the opportunity of espionage, a Communist, though he may hesitate momentarily, will always, exactly to the degree that he is a Communist, engage in espionage. The act will not appear to him in terms of betrayal at all. It will, on the contrary, appear to him as a moral act, the more deserving the more it involves him in personal risk, committed in the name of a faith (Communism) on which, he believes, hinges the hope and future of mankind, and against a system (capitalism) which he believes to be historically bankrupt. At that point, conscience to the Communist, and conscience to the non-Communist mean two things as opposed as the two sides of a battlefield. The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it. It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man's fate and future are involved, and hence, their conflict is irrepressible. The question of conscience can arise only when, for one reason or another, a Communist questions his faith, as I was about to do, or as later on, in different ways Wadleigh and Keith would do. Then it rises terribly indeed.

WHY I AM A FATALITY I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable—a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses—a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood—that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my time, no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on EArth.

Whether or not one believes in the accelerating dangers of the climate crisis, the end of fossil fuels, or the permanent annihilation of species of plants, insects and animals that essentially cover our ass by maintaining an inconceivably complex environment in which we have the freedom and responsibility to do pretty much whatever we’d like, it’s not too difficult to at least perceive the dangers of heightened tensions between cultures that now, for the first time, have the power to annihilate each other or the entire planet.

The source of the woes and unpleasantness that we are currently experiencing is the fact that the Communist Party consists of 10% convinced idealists who are ready to die for the idea, and 90% hangers-on without consciences, who have joined the party in order to get a position.’83

At the very least, given this symbolic process and its ideological consequences, mass incarceration’s racial disparities will rarely provoke a crisis of conscience for those ensconced in white dominant society. To be sure, there will be some white analysts who insist that knowledge of the disparity and the conditions of mass incarceration should generate society-wide shame and so indict a whole society for the indignity and inhumanity that U.S. prison institutions have institutionalized.

If a person must prove that he deserves to be free, then that person must first be free to make such a proof. Yet where does he get this freedom? The person would then be required to prove that he should have the right to prove the other right, and that would require another level of freedom, which the person must also prove—and so on, calling for an endless series of proofs. This may seem a strange observation, but abolitionists faced this exact problem during the Petition Crisis of the 1830s. For almost a decade, Congressman John Quincy Adams and others were forced to combat the Gag Rule, under which Southern representatives barred Congress from even receiving, let alone considering, petitions against slavery. Adams’s heroic struggle against this rule was a fight for the right of petition, one step removed from any debate over slavery.93 He was forced to argue that he should have the right to argue against the “peculiar institution.

Our crisis has many fathers. Among them is Newt Gingrich, the modern progenitor of that school of politics. Any honest accounting of how we got to this new day has to reckon with Newt, whose talent for politics exceeded his interest in governing.

Do not expect to be applauded when you do the right thing, and do not expect to be forgiven when you err. But even your enemies will respect commitment - and a conscience at peace is worth more than a thousand tainted victories

Article One of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 declared, ‘The Emperor of All Russia is an autocratic and unrestricted monarch. To obey his supreme authority, not only out of fear but out of conscience, God Himself commands.’18

And two types of people,” he goes on, completely unfazed. “There’s the one that will walk past that offending piece of lint or paper on the floor every single day and tell themselves they’ll get to it. And those that will pick it up the minute they spot it. They’ll figure out where it came from, trash it, and forget it was ever there. But, for the ones that walk by it every day, it will become a problem. It will start to fester. Another something they’ll have to get to. Another pea on their plate. They’ll start to look for it, its presence a nuisance, and tell themselves they’ll get to it tomorrow. Until one day, it’s more of a crisis of conscience than a pea.

For over thirty years Americans battled each other exegetically on this issue, with the more orthodox and the ones who took most seriously the authority of Scripture being also the ones most likely to conclude that the Bible sanctioned slavery... The most skillful use of the Bible in defending slavery came from Americans like Richard Fuller, Thomas Stringfellow, or even Moses Stuart who were careful exegetes of individual passages but who also knew how to pose the question of orthodox fidelity: will you follow God’s faithful word in the Bible or the deliverances of your own finite and easily swayed conscience?

A person who lacks empathy or conscience is a sociopath. Similarly, an economic system that is essentially amoral—that does not factor empathy or conscience into its determination of right action—is a sociopathic economic system. When a government has become for all intents and purposes a mere handmaiden to such an economic system, democracy dies. Today, Americans are living at the behest of a tyrannous economic system that puts the short-term profit maximization of huge, multinational corporate entities before the health and well-begin of our people, the people of the world, and the planet on which we live. Such is the crisis in which we find ourselves. Such is the crisis we must now transform.

But I felt constrained using the voice of an adolescent girl who didn’t know enough because I didn’t know enough. I was too young then. It was a crisis that swirled around me, rather than cut through me, and yet the riots have weighed on my conscience as a crucible of race relations that this nation failed.

Not just together. They’re practically engaged except for the pesky matter of your dad’s approval.” Layla grinned. “But you know what the two of them are like. They can’t get out of their own heads. It took a broken menstrual pad dispenser, a chance encounter, an inheritance, a failing company, a distillery, a rishta auntie, a hapless suitor, a spreadsheet, seven dates, a sword, extra-hot pork vindaloo, an Irish brawl, a sick dog, endless games of Guitar Hero, a hockey game, Shark Stew, a broken bed, a walk of shame, a quiz night, back-office shenanigans, a jealous ex, a motorcycle crash, a crisis of conscience, a break up, six pints of ice cream, four pounds of gummy bears, a partnership offer, a heart-to-heart, a family interrogation, a grovel, and a death-defying midnight climb to get them together. And now, apparently, it’s all up to you.

It took a broken menstrual pad dispenser, a chance encounter, an inheritance, a failing company, a distillery, a rishta auntie, a hapless suitor, a spreadsheet, seven dates, a sword, extra-hot pork vindaloo, an Irish brawl, a sick dog, endless games of Guitar Hero, a hockey game, Shark Stew, a broken bed, a walk of shame, a quiz night, back-office shenanigans, a jealous ex, a motorcycle crash, a crisis of conscience, a break up, six pints of ice cream, four pounds of gummy bears, a partnership offer, a heart-to-heart, a family interrogation, a grovel, and a death-defying midnight climb to get them together.

Of the “very self-righteous,” “nasty and mean-spirited” and “prejudiced” conservatives without conscience who were becoming the face of the Republican Party, Dean observed: “They are typically men whose desire in life is to dominate others and to be in charge. They are very aggressive when they do so. They are highly manipulative. They are also people who have absolutely no appreciation of equality of others. They see themselves as superior, and they are amoral in their thinking.” So amoral that, for reasons of political convenience, they might even reject public health mandates during a pandemic.

It has been the thesis of this book that freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an “individual,” but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously. Freedom has reached a critical point where, driven by the logic of its own dynamism, it threatens to change into its opposite. The future of democracy depends on the realization of the individualism that has been the ideological aim of modern thought since the Renaissance. The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The problem of production is solved—in principle at least—and we can visualize a future of abundance, in which the fight for economic privileges is no longer necessitated by economic scarcity. The problem we are confronted with today is that of the organization of social and economic forces, so that man—as a member of organized society—may become the master of these forces and cease to be their slave.

While adverse consequences of 100 years from now are obviously less pressing than those of next year, if they are also of large magnitude and irreversible, we cannot in good conscience discount them.

Pro Government or Pro Human Rights (Earth Administrative Service, Sonnet 1304) Either pro government or pro human rights, A civilized human cannot be both. Doesn't mean you're always anti government, It means you pledge no one blanket support. Gaza has made it more evident than ever, No politician got the guts to rock the boat. When the chips are down and balloon goes up, Politicians hide behind the diplomacy door. World leeches masquerading as world leaders, Would sell their mothers if the price is right. Sheeply civilians don't do much to change things, So they seek comfort in snobbish arguments on AI. Dump all autocratic nonsense of law-abidance, Tell the right from wrong by conscience rule. If you want human rights to reign supreme, Wake up and be the world leader of your hood.

Gen. Omar Bradley said on Armistice Day 1948: ‘We live in an age of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.

Some firms use ethics-speak as PR to reassure regulators and investors, even though studies have shown that the more often words like “ethics” and “corporate responsibility” appear in a firm’s annual report, the more likely it is to have a poor corporate governance record and a history of class action lawsuits.

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful, of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man. I am dynamite. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am Destiny,” I

In Conversation With The Earth! Hello I am Earth , your home, Hello I am human from Climate summit at Rome, Pleasure meeting you today, Well I thought you met and saw me everyday, Nevermind, human mind is a curious creation, Look at the devastation and your numb sensation, Water levels rising, Frequent wildfires are least surprising, Landslides burying people alive, For the poor Earth is no longer a place to thrive, CO2 emissions creating a blanket of doom, The world looks like a planet draped in agony and gloom, Deforestation has left me naked, By your callousness I feel raped, you humans are so ungrateful and wicked, The rising heat will kill us both, I will manage drifting in the universe but imagine your plight in the cosmic broth? You are the cause of your own extinction, And you seek mercy from me for this inevitable destruction, I am part of the universe the universe is not a part of me, And if there is a cause, an effect too there shall be! But I am wondering why you are still procrastinating, You are more interested in Mars’s Terraforming, Instead of saving your present home, Where there is Italy, Germany, India, America, Russia, China, many others and Rome, You seem to ignore my pleadings and warning signs, And somehow your conscience resigns, Into a slumber of thoughtlessness, And you seem willing to endure this perpetual feeling of restlessness, But refrain from acting now, Sometimes you just need to start, without wasting too much time on thinking how, This maybe my last conversation with you , my dear human being, It is time you believed in what you are seeing, A ravaged soul of mine, I fret and fume, yet you convince yourself I am fine, Because you can still breathe in my air, But how long, because you are offering me a bargain that is unfair, Very soon you may need protected air zones to survive, And then only those with a penny in the pocket shall be alive, Where will your less fortunate brothers and sisters go? I think after the great fall, today humanity has fallen really too low, Not placing restraint on their acts so ignoble, Although you see my scars so fresh and palpable, Anyway, why shall you care as long as you can breathe, And not realise the irony, the day you feel choked I too shall no more be able to breathe! Mars is a distant dream, Pay heed now when I yell and scream, Mars is just a reflection in the mirror, But I am the mirror, you just need to be a heedful observer, And act now before it is too late, And stop wasting time in a bureaucratically complex debate, Maybe this will be the last summer for you and me too, But I am still believing and expecting the best from you! By: Javid Ahmad Tak

Nonviolence doesn't mean silence, nonviolence means action out of conscience.

Arise my titans and fill the sky with your vigor infinite, pour the seas with your conscience upright, and envelop the lands with your sentience burning bright.

What haunted me most wasn’t the ropes, or the chair, or the gasoline, though those played recurring parts in my nightmares. It wasn’t Alistair, or Hadrian’s crisis of conscience. It was that we’d had the time, Holmes and I. Three long minutes before the police made it to us, enough for her to turn to me and say, This is what you have to do, and why you have to do it. No, what haunted me most was that I knew, had I confessed to August’s murder there on the lawn, Holmes would have found a way to clear my name. But she was letting her brother walk free for his mistake. She’d given up Bryony Downs to God knows what fate. She’d played judge and jury for Hadrian and Phillipa. And now she was letting herself be led away for a crime she didn’t commit, and she would walk away from it unscathed, and there would be no one doing time for August’s death. It wasn’t hers to decide. It wasn’t mine, either. Charlotte Holmes had told me once that she wasn’t a good person. That day I’d begun to believe it.

Wikipedia: Reconquista (Mexico) A prominent advocate of Reconquista was the Chicano activist and adjunct professor Charles Truxillo (1953–2015) of the University of New Mexico (UNM). He envisioned a sovereign Hispanic nation, the República del Norte (Republic of the North), which would encompass Northern Mexico, Baja California, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He supported the secession of US Southwest to form an independent Chicano nation and argued that the Articles of Confederation gave individual states full sovereignty, uncluding the legal right to secede. Truxillo, who taught at UNM's Chicano Studies Program on a yearly contract, suggested in an interview, "Native-born American Hispanics feel like strangers in their own land." He said, "We remain subordinated. We have a negative image of our own culture, created by the media. Self-loathing is a terrible form of oppression. The long history of oppression and subordination has to end" and that on both sides of the US–Mexico border "there is a growing fusion, a reviving of connections.... Southwest Chicanos and Norteño Mexicanos are becoming one people again." Truxillo stated that Hispanics who achieved positions of power or otherwise were "enjoying the benefits of assimilation" are most likely to oppose a new nation and explained: There will be the negative reaction, the tortured response of someone who thinks, "Give me a break. I just want to go to Wal-Mart." But the idea will seep into their consciousness, and cause an internal crisis, a pain of conscience, an internal dialogue as they ask themselves: "Who am I in this system?" Truxillo believed that the República del Norte would be brought into existence by "any means necessary" but that it would be formed by probably not civil war but the electoral pressure of the region's future majority Hispanic population. Truxillo added that he believed it was his duty to help develop a "cadre of intellectuals" to think about how the new state could become a reality.

I know my fate. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something frightful — a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences and the passing of a sentence upon all that has before been believed in, demanded and sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nothing of the founder of a religion in me. Religions belong to the rabble; after coming into contact with religious people I always feel that I must wash my hands. I do not want 'believers', I think that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never speak to masses. I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be considered 'holy'. You will understand why I publish this book beforehand — it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. I am nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more false has ever existed than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Revaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind’s greatest step towards coming to its senses — a step which in me has become flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millennia. I was the first to discover the truth and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious, to sense the lie as a lie. My genius lies in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted before and yet I am the very opposite to a negative spirit. I am the herald of joy the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such a height that has never been seen before my time. Mankind can only now begin to hope again, now that I have lived. Thus I am necessarily a man of Destiny. For when Truth battles against the lies of millennia there will be shock waves, earthquakes, the transposition of hills and valleys such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept 'politics' then becomes entirely absorbed into the realm of spiritual warfare. All the mighty worlds of the ancient order of society are blown into space — for they are all based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.

I had what we can call a “spiritual crisis,” a spontaneous awakening…. In my conscience it was a pure quest for God. Very simply. I am someone who asked himself existential questions, who told himself: “Here it is. I am forty years old, what have I done with my life? Where am I going?” Anxiety over death, anxiety over having lost something. (…) So I began this spiritual quest…. It is not so much my reading of Islamic or Islamist books which determined my action…but an internal logic which holds that Islam must lead to the imane [iman—“faith”], and the imane must go to the summit of ihsan [perfection], and the summit of ihsan is the jihad.101

Education is antecedent to most of our other public policy concerns. From poverty to crime to healthcare to substance abuse, if kids don’t get an education, we know that those other challenges are far more likely to follow; conversely, if children do get an excellent education, each of those problems is much more likely to be overcome. It is a damning stain on America’s conscience that a child’s chances of life success are so heavily influenced by-- perhaps dictated by-- the zip code in which he or she is raised. It is a profound civil rights crisis… the urgent need to secure access to a quality education-- and access to educational choice, in particular-- for every young American… In a just world, teachers unions would enthusiastically support school choice...But the union bosses who lead the teachers unions have decided that school choice is an existential threat to their power, and so they demand partisan fealty above all. -pp. 28-9

Wake up your conscience and hold it high as a beacon, so that the whole world can bask in its sanctimonious kernel of humaneness.

Rarely, if ever, does our conscience realizes the crisis our evil deeds cause. Seems the human mind is wired to find joy in another's misfortune. The Germans call it Schadenfreude.

Rise I Will (The Sonnet) Every time there is darkness most foul, I will burn to bring light, sight and might. Every time there is misery unbound, I will churn my soul to outpour delight. Every time the horizon turns gloomy, I will rush to the aid as a sentient soldier. Every time the world is infected, I will walk the alleys as a living sanitizer. Every time there is savagery on the rise, I will be the beacon of human alliance. Every time bigotry overpowers the minds, I'll be the call to resuscitate fallen conscience. I am not a person but a sentience beyond time. Rise I will always in crisis to fortify my humankind.

In short, by this time, Castro had concluded that the nation’s political, social, and cultural problems required real solutions beyond the reach of individual conscience, no matter how well-meaning. The crisis in housing, education, and health care were “problems for the state to resolve.” The way to address inequality was not through philanthropy but by taxing “the owners of 5th Avenue and Country Club mansions, recreational farms, aristocratic clubs, inheritance, and luxury.” Only then could Cuba ensure that no patient died because a rain shower had put off a fundraising drive, or because some soaking-rich countess had taken ill. It was past time for the very rich to lapse into extinction—“like Siboney Indian chiefs and manatees.

Instead, at eighteen, he felt his life was over for what he had done (his first murder), and that he didn’t deserve to be happy or successful. So alcohol, which he had already established as his escape, and he began to go through the motions of life until his dark fantasies took over. He always believed that a turning point in his life happened while in the haze of a lonely, alcoholic, sexless, emotionally bankrupt life. The simple act of an anonymous man at the public library—who tossed Dahmer a note offering to give him a blow job in the bathroom—caused him, at that moment, to decide to abandon the legitimate life he had created and instead pursue sex, and finally achieve love and physical relationships on his terms. He didn’t follow the man, but it seemed to have triggered a crisis of conscience in Dahmer, so deep that he finally admitted to himself that he was and always had been attracted to men, and in turn, that some men were attracted to him. He decided to live a lie no longer, and knew that he “wasn’t fooling anybody.” Further, the incident seemed to reawaken his lustful desire to engage with unconscious or dead bodies—to do whatever he wanted with the corpses of men.