“I think it better to do right, even if we suffer in so doing, than to incur the reproach of our '' 

 I think that this statement by Robert E. Lee is trying to say that people need to try and think about what they are doing in order to do the right thing. Sometimes people do things without even thinking about them because they feel that they don’t have to listen to what their mind is telling them to do. For example, if someone tells someone else to do something they don’t want to, but they do it either way without thinking about the consequences, they are not using they brain and they are not listening to their conscience.