Quotes About Guilt

If you throw yourself onto the fire of guilt, it will be a useless sacrifice. We do not know, any of us, the Great Mystery's purpose in this. But purpose there is.

I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.

brother? It is still light out. It is not yet reading time.' Tyrion looked guiltily at the copy of Maderion's Tales of the Caledorian Epoch that lay on the chipped table beside the bed. He walked over to the windows. The drapes were fusty and smelled of mould. Cold air whistled in through gaps in the shutters, despite the torn shreds of sacking he had stuffed into the gaps. There was no place in the old

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know "beyond a reasonable doubt" who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

There smites nothing so sharp, nor smelleth so sour as shame.

Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt.

I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!" —EDGAR ALLAN POE, "THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

Using guilt is not productive. Appealing to the greatness of others is what works for Warren, and it will work for you.

Le sentiment amoureux est le sentiment le plus culpabilisant.

Guilt is not enough to motivate surrender.

One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world.

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken

A single moment that lasts a lifetime, still poisoning anything I come close to, to this day. Every person I touch.

Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or—to put it better—the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent.22

Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin," von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.