Selected guilt quotes

1. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

2. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

3. A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

4. The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

5. In this rat-race everybody's guilty till proved innocent!

6. Well everybody's got a secret, son, something that they just can't face. Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it, they carry it with them every step that they take Till some day they just cut it loose, cut it loose or let it drag 'em down Where no one asks any questions or looks too long in your face In the darkness on the edge of town.

7. If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill every one of you. If that's guilt, I accept it.

8. The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

9. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

10. Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

11. I do not feel guilty of any war crimes, I have only done my duty as an intelligence organ, and I refuse to serve as an ersatz for Himmler.

12. We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

13. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

14. It doesn't matter whether I'm judged criminal. I have a great feeling of guilt - I have a feeling that I ran after Hitler like a wildfire without reason. If I can sacrifice my life to make something good, I'd gladly do it.

15. Moreover, there is this completely false trial. I would participate wholeheartedly in a trial if it were to determine the guilt for 5 million murdered people and the guilt for the atrocities. But I see in this trial endless other things brought out and I have the feeling that in the shadow of the guilt of these murders the German people shall be considered guilty of everything, and in the shadow of this guilt the Americans, English, French, and especially the Russians will want to get rid of their own dirty linen.

16. The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it.

17. I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

18. Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

19. Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

20. A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.

21. For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

22. Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

23. It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

24. I feel guilty just sitting around when I know I can be doing something.

25. What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

26. My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

27. Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.

28. There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.

29. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

30. The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

31. Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

32. A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

33. Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

34. How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

35. But ignorance of the law is no excuse. A person is guilty even if he breaks the law unknowingly. I shall be perhaps the first of the defendants to get up on that stand and admit that I am at least partly guilty.

36. Hitler gave us orders - and we believed in him. Then he commits suicide and leaves us to bear the guilt. He should have remained alive to bear his share.

37. I have nothing definite to apologize for, I'm just sorry about everything in general.

38. Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.

39. 'Villains!' I shrieked, 'dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!'

40. What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

41. Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel- I feel it all. Oh evil day! if I were sullen While the Earth herself is adorning, This sweet May-morning.

42. To regret your sins of commission as much as your sins of omission is to prove yourself a most unworthy sinner.

43. It was true enough, he did not appear ashamed - merely worried about his own immunity from trial as a war criminal.

44. Kurt Cobain often ridiculed rival Pearl Jam, arguing that it lacked the underground purity of Nirvana - that it was simply an old-line commercial rock band in grunge clothing. But Cobain, who was 27 when he died, liked Vedder personally, and that made him feel guilty about the put-downs. 'I'm not going to do that anymore,' he said in a 1992 interview. 'It hurts Eddie and he's a good guy'; L.A. Times 5/1/94, 'He Didn't Ask for All This' (Cobain about Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam)

45. 'Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)': Jesus died For somebody's sins But not mine

46. I always had the impression that Rosenberg embodied German mysticism. I felt that he belonged to the Romantic era and that there was only a slight whiff of modernity about him. There was nothing unified or organized about the man. Now I want to say something terrible, which is not for the trial. This pure theoretician carries the main guilt of all those who sit here on the defendants' bench, although he carries that guilt to a certain extent innocently. In my opinion, he had a tremendous influence on Hitler, during the period when Hitler still did some thinking - later that stopped. I mean about between the years 1923 and 1928 Rosenberg influenced Hitler. Let me explain. Hitler was a man who lived in the present and was a tremendously active individual. Rosenberg's importance exists because his ideas, which were only theoretical, became in the hands of Hitler a reality and actually transpired.

47. Suppose, Christopher now said to himself, I have a Nazi Army at my mercy. I can blow it up by pressing a button. The men in that Army are notorious for torturing and murdering civilians - all except for one of them, Heinz. Will I press the button? No - wait: Suppose I know that Heinz himself, out of cowardice or moral infection, has become as bad as they are and takes part in all their crimes? Will I press that button, even so? Christopher's answer, given without the slightest hesitation, was: Of course not. That was a purely emotional reaction. But it helped Christopher think his way through to the next proposition. Suppose that Army goes into action and has just one casualty, Heinz himself. Will I press the button now and destroy his fellow criminals? No emotional reaction this time, but a clear answer, not to be evaded: Once I have refused to press that button because of Heinz, I can never press it. Because every man in that Army could be someone's Heinz and I have no right to play favorites. Thus Christopher was forced to recognize himself as a pacifist - although by an argument which he could only admit to with the greatest reluctance.

48. The first time I saw you I knew it would never last I'm not half what I wish I was I'm so angry I don't think it'll ever pass And I was bad news for you just because I never meant to hurt you

49. I can't hold on very long Forgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way home

50. She knew exactly what she had done to him. And yet she couldn't quite believe that she was jerking him around

51. Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?' No ma'am. I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts.. And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else

52. There was no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, between those whose deaths achieved no purpose and those who had to die if mankind on treason was to mean anything

53. For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longer to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done

54. We haven't the power to change men's hearts. We're not responsible. It isn't our fault. Your hands are clean aren't they? Out here where the sun keeps everything pure. But you're not pure! Because if you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, the you are guilty. It is your fault. We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them

55. He had an overdeveloped sense of empathy. He could imagine other peoples suffering, and felt it himself. His mother had used that against him all his life, torturing him with guilt for all the suffering of her life

56. This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous 'work,' and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.

57. We were a ghastly crew.

58. I'm having nightmares, homicidal fantansies/I wake up stranglin, danglin my bed sheets/I call the nurse cause it hurts, to reminisce/How did it come to this? I wish they didn't miss

59. You violated, now I'm back to haunt your nights/Listen to the screams, of the lives you sacrificed

60. Twenty years. Well...that's fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain. I said the sentences must be severe, and I admitted my share of the guilt, so it would be ridiculous if I complained about the punishment.

61. O Death, rock me asleep, Bring me to quiet rest, Let pass my weary guiltless ghost Out of my careful breast.

62. A sensible human once said, 'If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit'; and again, 'She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.'

63. Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil. Other than that, though, it's been a good day.

64. My guilt is that I am still here...I should have died. That is my guilt.

65. The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.

66. The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

67. He'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

68. One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. To dwell long upon them is to add to the offense. Repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by something better, which is as free and original as if they had not been.

69. Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.

70. Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?

71. In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

72. I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.

73. I thought of my own wife's tears and her limp submission the night before - the bleak satisfaction I took from her smallness as I used her shamelessly. She's cried out, and remembering the taste of salted tears, I thought, for that instant, that I knew how the devil felt. Sex and tears, like sun and rain, were never meant to share a moment: but for a fallen soul, an act of wrong could, at times, feel very right, and that scared the hell out of me.

74. I get guilty when I spend money on silly things like clothes and stuff... Having experienced a completely different extreme of wealth, and I don't mean me being poor or rich, I mean knowing that 40 quid that gets spent on a pair of shoes could go a long way for a family in Georgia for a week or even a month, having experienced that, you're a bit more [guilty].

75. What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD.

76. I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

77. When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

78. People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

79. There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

80. When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away?

81. The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, is - to die.

82. Whenever I meet Ukridge's Aunt Julia I have the same curious illusion of having just committed some particularly unsavoury crime and-what is more-of having done it with swollen hands, enlarged feet, and trousers bagging at the knee on a morning when I had omitted to shave.

83. Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

84. He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked.

85. To say that his conscience was clear would be inaccurate, for he did not have a conscience, but he had what was much better, an alibi...

86. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.

87. To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures - to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name - I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, 'And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?' I would never have dared reply, 'I'm just enjoying myself, Lord.' I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave.

88. Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

89. And Reason kens he herits in A haunted house. Tenants unknown Assert their squalid lease of sin With earlier title than his own.

90. There's just ae thing I cannae bear, An' that's my conscience.

91. Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

92. Nothing can be more wounding to a spirit not ungenerous, than a generous forgiveness.

93. This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead That sparkled so the day I saw it first, And darkened slowly after. I am she Who loves all beauty - yet I wither it.

94. Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say 'you are a sinner', and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

95. L'?il etait dans la tombe et regardait Cain.

96. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

97. All the several pleas and excuses, which protect the committer of a forbidden act from the punishment which is otherwise annexed thereto, may be reduced to this single consideration, the want or defect of will. An involuntary act, as it has no claim to merit, so neither can it induce any guilt: the concurrence of the will, when it has its choice either to do or to avoid the fact in question, being the only thing that renders human actions either praiseworthy or culpable. Indeed, to make a complete crime, cognizable by human laws, there must be both a will and an act.

98. It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

99. When you receive these lines I shall be no more. I cannot bear the reproach that I have sealed the fate of the West through faulty measures, and I have no means of defending myself. I draw a conclusion from that and am dispatching myself where already thousands of my comrades are. I have never feared death. Life has no more meaning for me, and I also figure that I'm on the list of war criminals who are to be delivered up. Our applications were not dictated by pessimism but by sober knowledge of the facts. I do not know if Field-Marshal Model, who has been proved in every sphere, will still master the situation. From my heart I hope so. Should it not be so, however, and your cherished new weapons do not succeed, then, my Fuhrer, make up your mind to end the war and put an end to a hopeless struggle when necessary. The German people have received such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness. There must be ways to attain this end, and above all, to prevent the Reich from falling under the Bolshevist heel.

100. My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won't come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he's going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God's gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it's really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea... But it also means that no one will believe you if it's true. You're the little boy who cried wolf. And for me it's true...I don't think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he'd probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good.