Culpability Quotes

The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom.

It's hard to determine where lies culpability.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

Family violence is a criminal act; perpetrators, while often former victims themselves, need to accept culpability.

The rich believe that they're different and that it is their right to pay a much lower tax rate. The response that you see from people on Wall Street, their dismissal and their almost contempt for the concerns about their culpability in the financial crisis, about the income inequality, shows that they are completely out of touch.

That is my job as an intellectual, as an extension of my vocation: to engage in a serious reckoning with the present manifestation of both white supremacy, white refusal to acknowledge culpability, and the attempts of black people to re-describe the harm and trauma we've endured, as well as to say afresh what it is that must be done if we are to be conscientious.

The rush to attribute culpability to a minority after an act of mass murder is a rush to exonerate the general public – how can we specify the ways in which the killer was not “one of us”? When the shooter comes from a racial or religious group, this is a relatively simple if despicable enterprise. When they are just another white male, the only remaining option is to locate a disability diagnosis.

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.

The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions.

I have become convinced, through my studies, that the only way to achieve a safe, just and viable world is to live by the Golden Rule. This is what drives my writing. I want to point out this interconnectedness, point out the beauty of the faith in all traditions without exception, show the complexity of the atrocities that we have experienced, and our shared culpability as a species.