Quotes About Culpability

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

Everyone is equally responsible for the shit they bring into the world.

The result has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflections on their own culpability has mainly had the effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of human experience with a handy two or three sentence dismissal (you know: all about projecting one's sense of Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel morally superior to those who do.

God, Private Enterprise and government have made me what I am, and now they have to take some of the blame.

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.

I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.

There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the crimes he committed, Barbra thought, except that when he was caught, he was never held accountable, and even that was no big surprise.)

He liked being in a place where everything from forgetfulness to homicide might be blamed on the heat.

La responsabilidad siempre es ajena, y es tan fácil esparcirla…

As "shifters" we tend to see ourselves as innocent victims – when something goes wrong, it's always because of what someone else did. Others of us have the opposite tendency: we are all too aware of the negative consequences of our own actions. In the face of this, others' contributions seem insignificant. An "absorber" tends to feel responsible for everything.

Any time a team doesn't score points, it's on me.

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.

Still, I shouldered part of the blame, maybe because it gave me some sense of control in an uncontrollable situation.

Trials rarely found men not guilty. The general view was that if a man were innocent he would not have got into trouble in the first place.

That would hang us, every mother's son.

Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it?

Let them hang themselves in their own straps.

Well, if Mr. McLovick didn't plant the bomb, then someone else did.

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.

The Avengers have the same unfortunate tendency as ordinary law enforcement. Once we have a perpetrator to hang the crime on, we look no further.

You are the sum total of all that we have been," said the youngster who looked like my former self. "In a way we are the ones to execute John Dawson. Because you can't do it without us. Now, do you see?" I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.

As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.

Nadie es la víctima de nadie, sino de sí mismo

No estamos en el teatro! Cuando se supone que se ha llegado al final, no basta con bajar el telón. Y si la obra es mala, pues bien la culpa es tuya.