Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion
Edmund Burke
However boldly their warm blood was spilt, Their life was shame, their epitaph was guilt; And this they knew and felt, at least the one, The leader of the hand he had undone,-- Who, born for better things, had madly set His life upon a cast, which linger'd yet.
Lord Byron
The ghostly consciousness of wrong.
Thomas Carlyle
Wickedness consists in the very hesitation about an act, even though it be not perpetrated.
Cicero
Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.
Cicero
Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it.
William Congreve
He swears, but he, is sick at heart; He laughs, but he turns deadly pale; His restless eye and sudden start-- These tell the dreadful tale That will be told: it needs no words from thee Thou self-sold slave to guilt and misery.
Richard Henry Dana, Sr.
My hands are guilty, but my heart is free.
John Dryden
Thoughts cannot form themselves in words so horrid As can express my guilt.
John Dryden
Fraud and falsehood are his weak and treacherous allies; and he lurks trembling in the dark, dreading every ray of light, lest it should discover him, and give him up to shame and punishment.
Henry Fielding
Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.
Henry Fielding