"Culpability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been his attitude from the moment the detective left. My own insistence that it was our duty to track down the thief met with nothing but a shrug. Another person might have suspected that this apathy only proved his own culpability in the theft, but such a suspicion never for a moment crossed my mind. He was, as he said, sick of the very name of bonds, and with a person of his temperament that ended the matter. Though I did not comprehend his attitude, still I took him at his word. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... carelessness of the injured party; probably a somewhat larger number are due to the carelessness of some other employee; while a very considerable proportion are incidents of the trade and due to no definite culpability which it is possible to trace home either to the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Judge, "you have committed an act of grievous impropriety. You have been guilty of one of the most reprehensible offences that any citizen of a Commonwealth founded upon order and justice could commit, an act of such flagrant culpability that the Court, in the maintenance of its dignity and in the interest of the Commonwealth found it necessary to visit upon you punishment of great severity and incarcerate you in the gaol usually reserved for the most depraved malefactors. Intemperance ...
— The Sheriffs Bluff - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... person, nor otherwise, will you ever attempt to discover the person in behalf of whom I treat. You will swear that when you have been informed of the facts which I shall point out to you, when you shall have received proof of the culpability of certain men, you will cause them to be arrested and give them no clue to, and make no revelation of, the means by which you acquired ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... other day and is getting convalescent, has been taken under the wing of our commander-in-chief, and his lips will be sealed by the time we get out—if ever we get out. With an official history and a discreet independent version, no one will ever understand what bungling there has been, and what culpability. It is our chicken-hearted chiefs, and they alone, who should be discredited. With a few exceptions, they are more afraid than the women, and never venture beyond the British Legation. Everything is left to the younger men, whose economic value ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... years since there was a movement in France to perpetuate De Lesseps's name by officially calling the waterway the Canal de Lesseps. But England withheld its approval, while other interests having a right to be heard believed that the stigma of culpability over the Panama swindles was fastened upon De Lesseps too positively to merit the tribute desired by his relatives and friends. As a modified measure, however, the canal administration was willing to appropriate a modest sum to provide a statue of the ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... to the rich? You never hear the word applied to a poor child, even if his father was, habit and repute, a thief. Surely, when hunger and cold aggravate the attacks of inherited temptation, they cannot at the same time aggravate the culpability of yielding to them?" ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... moral censure according to the opportunities of the offender? Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural passion, for bad education, bad example? Except that we feel that all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them. But what we act upon in private life we cannot acknowledge in our general ethical theories, and while our conduct in detail is human and just, we have ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent, since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints counted themselves the greatest ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Mr. Ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probably the most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of their relative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worst among them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad a thing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far. Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original books which would survive; for the censor who imagines ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... courageous and venturesome disposition. He was suspected of endeavouring to excite his regiment to rebel in behalf of the Independence. An inquiry was consequently instituted, which ended without proof of the captain's culpability; nevertheless, as the governor still maintained his suspicions, he gave orders for him to be sent to one of the southern provinces, under the inspection of an alcaide. Novales came to see me the morning of his departure, and complained bitterly ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... the echo came back from the Cannes Brulees—that the very bottom culpability of this thing rested on the Grandissimes, and specifically on their fugleman Agricola, through his putting the hellish African upon him. Moreover, fever and death, to a degree unknown before, fell ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... had broken up the peace of a woman whom, though he did not love, he respected and warmly regarded! His mind was in too tumultuous a state for him to attempt to settle with himself the degree of his culpability. He only knew that he was abased in his own sense of deep injury towards a fellow-creature. In the same breath came the destruction of his hopes,—hopes, of which, till the moment, he had been scarcely conscious,—with regard to the one on whom his thoughts had been really fixed. He ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau |
