Quotes About Guilt And Innocence

#1. Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.

Matthew Scully

#2. Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#3. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Susan Sontag

#4. [O]ur needs were quite different; what grips me need hardly touch you at all, and vice versa; what is innocence in you may be guilt in me, and vice versa; what has no consequences for you may be the last nail in my coffin.

Franz Kafka

#5. I believe in innocence until there's proof of guilt and all that.

Carolyn Hax

#6. An indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm; yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense.

Herman Melville

#7. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Ken MacLeod

#8. If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Charlotte Bronte

#9. The innocence that feels no risk and is taught no caution, is more vulnerable than guilt, and oftener assailed.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

#10. The decision of such judges as Claudius and his Senate is worth very little in the question of a man's innocence or guilt; but the sentence was that Seneca should be banished to the island of Corsica.

Frederic William Farrar

#11. If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.

Albert Camus

#12. Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

William Congreve

#13. Many may very well continue to ask why more value is placed on technicalities of a law than on a man's flesh and blood life, especially when there is any amount of "doubt" at all regarding his guilt or innocence.

Aberjhani

#14. In Staten Island, when you have video showing the alleged chokehold used on Eric Garner, why not go to trial and have the officer(s) explain the tape, and then this jury can determine guilt or innocence? The tape should guarantee that there should be a trial.

Al Sharpton

#15. ... as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through casual association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal- a hacked one.

Herman Melville

#16. I walked, floated, lighter - forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self - forgiveness for my innocence.

Aspen Matis

#17. The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

Samuel Johnson

#18. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing
by dint of ignorance and innocence
that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.

Gregory Maguire

#19. Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.

Whittaker Chambers

#20. Innocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, "I didn't do it." Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.

Leonard Peltier

#21. because only love is real. It is our function to see through the illusion of guilt, to the innocence that lies beyond. "To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All

Marianne Williamson

#22. Presumptions of guilt or innocence may sometimes be strengthened or weakened by the place of birth and kind of education and associates a man has grown up with, and good character may at times interpose, and justly save, under suspicion, one who is accused of crime on slight circumstances.

Levi Woodbury

#23. The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.

Katherine Boo

#24. The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him.

John Marshall

#25. He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it

Graham Greene

#26. Vice, like virtue, Grows in small steps, and no true innocence Can ever fall at once to deepest guilt.

Jean Racine

#27. Influence is everything, and guilt or innocence merely an academic question

Margaret Mitchell

#28. Lawyers tried to compose a story - one of innocence or of guilt - and make it seem the only possibility, taking advantage of the conventions of the genre and of human nature, which was so eager to confirm its prejudices.

Pablo De Santis

#29. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

#30. One part of love is innocence, One part of love is guilt, One part the milk, that in a sense Is soured as soon as spilt, One part of love is sentiment, One part of love is lust, One part is the presentiment Of our return to dust. Eight lines, and it was all over;

Clive Barker

#31. Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

Mason Cooley

#32. To the extent we are perceiving anyone's guilt -choosing to focus on the errors of their personality rather than the eternal innocence of their spirit - we're closing our hearts, deflecting a miracle and causing our own inevitable suffering.

Marianne Williamson

#33. No acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.

Henry Fielding

#34. And everything was made of paper: sentences, pardons, pleas, bad records, demerits, proof of guilt, but never, it seemed, proof of innocence. If there were no paper, Carter felt, the entire judicial system would collapse and disappear.

Patricia Highsmith

#35. I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.

Werner Herzog