Moral Guilt Quotes

After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,--those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

I'm guilty as sin. I did something morally wrong. I gave in to the prestige and power, the things that went with my job. I knew that the Governor, the man that appointed me, wanted no recommendation for clemency in any death case.

Let us not despair; it is a blessed cause, and success, ere long, will crown our exertions. Already we have gained one victory; we have obtained, for these poor creatures, the recognition of their human nature, which, for a while was most shamefully denied. This is the first fruits of our efforts; let us persevere and our triumph will be complete. Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini.

Sin and shame ever go together; he that would be freed from the last must be sure to shun the company of the first.

I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.

A guilty conscience never feels secure.

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.

A god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house.

What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini. England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red - not merely Germany and Japan.

I think what's dangerous is the idea that someone can wash away your sins.

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.

True penance consists in regretting without ceasing the faults of the past, and in firmly resolving to never again commit that which is so deplorable.

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor feel that they are really guilty.