individual culpability Quotes

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—-though naturally to differing extents-—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

Some people think there's a woman to blame, but I know - it's my own damn fault

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

My mother always says: "You know better, so you'll be punished. Your friends don't know better, so they won't be punished. They can go snatch chains and they'll be fine. But if you snatch chains, you'll end up in jail because you know better."

Never accept the blame for what evil people do. We are all responsible for our own actions." She was lecturing him, so she stopped. "Sorry. Hang around with Bran too long, and see if you don’t start passing around the Marrok’s advice as if he were Confucius.

I just want everybody to know, on a personal note, from me, sincerely, it was all his fault.

We, we, and none else, are responsible for what we suffer. We are the effects, and we are the causes.

If any man has done wrong, the harm is his own. But perhaps he has not done wrong.

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Inference is founded upon obvious reasons. Regard to reputation has a less active influence, when the infamy of a bad action is to be divided upon a number, than when it is to fall singly upon one. A spirit of faction . . . will often hurry the persons of whom they were composed into improprieties and excesses for which they would blush in a private capacity.

Is God to blame for what I myself have done?

I do not believe in collective guilt.

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

I believe that in your heart you already know something is profoundly wrong. When bartenders are responsible for drunk drivers' acts, and gunmakers are responsible for criminals' acts, and nobody is responsible for O. J. Simpson's acts, something is wrong.