Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Jordan Grumet, on Tyrants Vs. Saints)

“The tyrant seeks to bend the world to their will. They apply power externally to remake the environment, people, or culture around them, often in the belief that if they can just change enough out there, they will finally feel whole inside. Saints, on the other hand, reverse this equation. They focus their power inward—working on themselves, healing their wounds, mastering their habits, refining their values. Ironically, it’s through this inward mastery that they end up changing the world more deeply than any tyrant ever could.”— Dr. Jordan Grumet, “Tyrants vs. Saints: The Power That Changes Everything” (“The Regret-Free Life” blog), Psychology Today, Apr. 15, 2025

The image accompanying this post shows perhaps the epitome of a saint in conflict with a tyrant: left to right, a pensive St. Thomas More and a browbeating King Henry VIII (played by, respectively, Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw) in the 1966 Best Picture Oscar winner, A Man for All Seasons.

The crisis that Henry forced on More is a reminder not only of the heavy burden that public officials face in drawing a moral line that arbitrary rulers cannot cross, but also the responsibility that ordinary individuals must maintain in upholding the primacy of conscience.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on ‘The Only Wise and Safe Course’)

“The only wise and safe course is to act from day to day in accordance with what one's own conscience seems to decree." — British Prime Minister and Nobel Literature laureate Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), The Gathering Storm (Volume One of “The Second World War”) (1948)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Soren Kierkegaard, on Human and Divine Justice)

“Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity’s memory.” — Danish Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), “Against Cowardliness,” in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (1843)

Quote of the Day (William Wordsworth, on Conscience, ‘Reverenced and Obeyed’)

“By strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas.
Alas! the endowment of immortal power
Is matched unequally with custom, time,
And domineering faculties of sense
In all; in most with superadded foes,
Idle temptations; open vanities,
Ephemeral offspring of the unblushing world;
And, in the private regions of the mind,
Ill-governed passions, ranklings of despite,
Immoderate wishes, pining discontent,
Distress and care. What then remains?—To seek
Those helps for his occasions ever near
Who lacks not will to use them; vows, renewed
On the first motion of a holy thought;
Vigils of contemplation; praise; and prayer—
A stream, which, from the fountain of the heart
Issuing, however feebly, nowhere flows
Without access of unexpected strength.
But, above all, the victory is most sure
For him, who, seeking faith by virtue, strives
To yield entire submission to the law
Of conscience—conscience reverenced and obeyed,
As God's most intimate presence in the soul,
And his most perfect image in the world.”— English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 –1850), “The Excursion” (1814)

Quote of the Day (St. Ambrose of Milan, on the Burdens of a Guilty Conscience)

“But nothing causes such exceeding grief as when anyone, lying under the captivity of sin, calls to mind from where he has fallen, because he turned aside to carnal and earthly things, instead of directing his mind in the beautiful ways of the knowledge of God. So you find Adam concealing himself, when he knew that God was present and wishing to be hidden when called by God with that voice which wounded the soul of him yourself? Why are you concealed? Why do you avoid Him Whom you once longed to see? A guilty conscience is so burdensome that it punishes itself without a judge, and wishes for covering, and yet is bare before God.” —St. Ambrose of Milan (340-397 A.D.), Concerning Repentance, Book II (A.D. 384)

Quote of the Day (Anne Frank, on the ‘Upholding of One’s Own Honor and Conscience’)

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don’t necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can’t accept, but still a religion, it doesn’t matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn’t the fear of God but the upholding of one’s own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn’t know it must learn and find by experience that: ‘A quiet conscience makes one strong!’” —Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

On an unrecorded date 70 years ago this month, 15-year-old Anne Frank and her older sister Margot died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Before she perished, Anne told childhood friend Nanette Konig, also at the Nazi death camp, that after the war she planned to use her diary entries as the basis for a book.

Anne did not survive, but her diary, of course, did. It is the extraordinary record of a girl moving into adulthood under the most harrowing conditions—and, along the way, developing a powerful conscience. The diary also stands as a rebuke to the forces of intolerance. In her time, they were Nazis; in ours, even in the Europe that once paid dearly for its acquiescence to evil, anti-Semitism continues to spread across national borders.

Anne “would be very happy with all the attention she is getting,” Ms. Konig told an interviewer from London’s The Independent this week. “She always wanted to be seen. She wanted to be heard. She was full of life and this would be right in her, what she would have liked to happen."