Daily Inspiration Quote by Georg Buchner

A good man with a good conscience does not hurry because he is neither fleeing guilt nor rushing to prove himself. He moves with the measured pace of someone who does not need to outrun his own actions. The line also hints at a moral psychology: conscience, when truly awake, imposes slowness. It pauses, considers consequences, and resists the intoxication of speed that often accompanies certainty. To walk fast here suggests the agitation of fear, vanity, or zealotry; to walk slowly suggests steadiness, accountability, and the courage to bear the weight of reflection.

Georg Buchner understood how moral language masks violence. A radical young dramatist writing in the shadow of political upheavals, he returned again and again to the French Revolution, especially its Reign of Terror. His characters wrestle with the gap between lofty ideals and human frailty, between the rhetoric of virtue and the machinery of power. In that setting, haste becomes deadly. Revolutionary tribunals boast of purity precisely while accelerating executions. Speed masquerades as moral clarity; hesitation is condemned as weakness. Buchner counterposes that frenzy with an ethic of scruple: a person who actually hears conscience cannot cut through dilemmas as if they were mere obstacles.

Yet the statement is not simple praise of slowness. Buchner is ironist enough to let it sting. The unhurried can be humane, but they can also be complicit if they delay when others are endangered. The line therefore frames a tension central to his work: conscience as ballast and conscience as drag. It challenges the intoxication of swift righteousness and calls for the modesty of doubt, without turning doubt into an alibi. In an age of moral panics and snap judgments, the image of the unhurried walker offers a test: are we moving fast because we must, or because we fear what conscience would show us if we stopped?