Culprit Quotes & Sayings

The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game. The culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about 'inflation,' for which virtually everyone else in society seems to be responsible. What we are seeing is the old ploy by the robber who starts shouting 'Stop, thief!' and runs down the street pointing ahead at others. — Murray Rothbard

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person. — Ernst Junger

Naturally the villagers blamed bears. No one had ever seen a bear in Gavaldon, but this made them more determined to find one. Four years later, when two more children vanished, the villagers admitted they should have been more specific and declared black bears the culprit, bears so black they blended with the night. But when children continued to disappear every four years, the village shifted their attention to burrowing bears, then phantom bears, then bears in disguise ... Until it became clear it wasn't it wasn't bears at all. — Soman Chainani

Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. — Anna Quindlen

The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf. — Thomas Sowell

If the woman has the physical fitness and the meritorious luck to bear his children, the family was a fortunate one. Villagers always looked at sterility with a squinted eye, and its fault and the misfortune lay solely on the woman's part. As such, a childless woman often became culprit for her entire life. — Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing - oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit. — Janet Frame

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it. — Neil Burger

He said her name like a detective unmasking the face of the culprit he'd suspected all along. — Allyse Near

Reproof, especially as it relates to children, administered in all gentleness, will render the culprit not afraid, but ashamed to repeat the offence. — Hosea Ballou

The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus "miracles" attested to, and scapegoats
such as Jews or witches
hunted down and burned. — Christopher Hitchens

And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture. — Jason L. Riley

Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. — Joseph Heller

Puberty was the main culprit in ending my acting career. I went from being kind of this chunky little kid to looking different, and I was really bummed because I loved acting. — Jeff Cohen

Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. In — Joseph Heller

Great is the power of Eloquence; but never is it so great as when it pleads along with nature, and the culprit is a child strayed from his duty, and returned to it again with tears. — Laurence Sterne

I think the church is often a culprit in the busyness, especially in the evangelical church. Again, it's part of being Americans. Part of being evangelicals too is that we're highly activist. We are always diving in, willing to solve problems, and again there's a lot good there. But we also need the theological balance that the Kingdom is not ours to bring or ours to create. — Kevin DeYoung

For myself the delay may be compared with a reprieve; for in confidence I assure you, with the world it would obtain little credit that my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties, without that competency of political skill, abilities and inclination which is necessary to manage the helm. — George Washington

Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."
I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore begun. — Ann Rule

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination ... — Marcel Proust

This tree, though, had not been fed on, so it was apparent that the culprit was a bull (elephant) who was filled with testosterone but no outlet for it, so he pushed over trees. It's a great release for a bull and a way of showing his strength after a female has rejected him. If human males had the same ability, global deforestation would be complete by now. — Peter Allison

Excess oestrogen can be another likely culprit when it comes to fluid retention. It can also drive headaches, including migraines, increase blood clotting, decrease libido, interfere with thyroid hormone production, and, due to its relationship with progesterone, lead us to feel like we have to do everything with haste. So, big health and therefore beauty consequences all because there is too much of one little hormone. — Libby Weaver

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me. — Nicole Holofcener

Time never changes - we change. We complain that time is the culprit which forces us to change. — Debasish Mridha

The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis. — Susan George

Because many of the people who were taken by the wasting disease happened to be white, God was not a viable culprit. — Walidah Imarisha

Heroin was a coping mechanism that I had used to deal with my underlying fears. They were the real problems; heroin wasn't the culprit, my fears were. — Pax Prentiss

It occurred to us, from observation and from reasonin, that extra marital sex was not what really destroyed marriages, but rather the lies and deception that invariably accompanied it
that was the culprit. Page 317 — Ossie Davis Ruby Dee

The manufacturing of most goods harms the environment in one way or another. The culprit is not the factory, but it is we who buy what it produces. Therefore we should think carefully about items we purchase. — Amy Dacyczyn

There's a reason you probably haven't heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can't be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn't the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives' beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place ... — Thomas Frank

I am not staying with the murderer," she said, her words muffled by his jacket. "I am not staying with the victim Abel Tannatek or the culprit Abel Tannatek. I am staying with the storyteller. — Antonia Michaelis

They say it was Cesc Fabregas who threw the pizza at me but, to this day, I have no idea who the culprit was. — Alex Ferguson

I was an infant when my mother went To see an atheist burned. She took me there. The dark-robed priests were met around the pile; The multitude was gazing silently; And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien, Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye, Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth; The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. Weep not, child! cried my mother, for that man Has said, 'There is no God.' — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Parents are the biggest culprit. In a bid to make their child score high marks, they are willing to indulge in practices that are unethical, like buying projects. They do not realise that such attempts will not make their child brighter or think over ideas. — Arvind Gupta

Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. ( ... ) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her. — Alice Miller

And what hypocrisy it is on the part of our Government to have the Bible in our courts of law for the culprit to take his oath upon and then be tried for the very crimes which the Bible itself sanctions. — Joseph Lewis

And before you know it, the object disappears, arguments evaporate; no culprit is discovered, the offense ceases to be an offense and becomes a matter of fate, like the toothache which cannot be blamed on anyone, and the only thing that's left is, once again, to bang the wall as hard as you can. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is ironic that the Great Depression was produced by government but was blamed on the private enterprise system. The Federal Reserve System explained in its 1933 annual report how much worse things would have been if the Federal Reserve had not behaved so well, yet the Federal Reserve was the chief culprit in making the depression as deep as it was. So the government produced the depression, the private enterprise system got blamed for it, and there was a tremendous change in attitudes. — Milton Friedman

Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group - or of the food supply - are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that - in addition to murder and theft - one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, "assassination of the culprit by the entire group." A — Sebastian Junger

Of course, having a culprit, someone to take the brunt of your anger, is an open door, a chance to temporarily escape your suffering. And the more odious the crime, the more ideal the culprit, the more legitimate your hatred. You think about him in order not to think about yourself. You hate him in order not to hate what's left of your life. You rejoice at his death in order not to have to smile at those who remain. — Antoine Leiris

If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim would be bound in the shackles of victimhood. — Desmond Tutu

Then there was the general state of sanity. If you looked through someone, really got down to their motivations, you found that they were only motivated by a few things. Money was the usual culprit. Follow the money, and it usually led to the truth, and underlying motivation. Next were the genuine do-gooders. They truly wanted change for the sake of improving people's lot in life. The thing they didn't understand was that their agenda could have unintended consequences. They couldn't see past their initial goal, and really analyze a situation. Last were the people who had an agenda to make every one live by their point of view. — Steven Becker

I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit. — Emanuel Ax

Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty - a state of mind unknown to the religious fanatic. — Anthony De Mello

Her wide, gorgeous smile was the culprit. It was pure magic. Neighbors lined the parking lot, eager to empty their pockets, all so she'd shine that beam on them. — Rachel Harris

Whenever you hear a politician carry on about what a mess the schools are, be aware that you are looking at the culprit. — Molly Ivins

through the air, reaching the culprit first; and nothing remained to Buck but to recover the bone. That was fair of Francois, he decided, and the half-breed began his rise in Buck's estimation. The other dog made no advances, nor received any; also, he did not attempt to steal from the newcomers. He was a gloomy, — Jack London

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process. — Ryu Murakami

Not one of the orthodox ministers dare preach what he thinks if he knows a majority of his congregation think otherwise. He knows that every member of his church stands guard over his brain with a creed, like a club, in his hand. He knows that he is not expected to search after the truth, but that he is employed to defend the creed. Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment. — Robert G. Ingersoll

At times many of us let that enemy of achievement
even the culprit 'self-defeat'
dwarf our aspirations, smother our dreams, cloud our vision, and impair our lives. The enemy's voice whispers in our ears, 'You can't do it.' 'You're too young.' 'You're too old.' 'You're nobody.' This is when we remember that we are created in the image of God. Reflection on this truth provides a profound sense of strength and power. — Thomas S. Monson

Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just - his turn! — Peter Ustinov

No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit. — Umberto Eco

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large. — Jacob Weisberg

The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction with the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The consumer is both culprit and victim of the confusion on quality. — Nino Cerruti

While 'Visitation Street' has the markings of a traditional whodunnit mystery - starting with a missing girl, intrigue and many suspicious characters - Pochoda shows her hand early on by fingering a culprit. The book turns, then, into a 'whydunnit.' — Claire Cameron

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation. — Claude Levi-Strauss

The next day she carried her secret weapon to school in her satchel. She was tingling with excitement. She was longing to tell matilda about her plan of battle. In fact, she wanted to tell the whole class. But she finally decided to tell nobody. It was better that way, because then no one, even when put under the most severe torture, would be able to name her as a culprit. — Roald Dahl

My investigative technique mostly consisted of going through the list of interested parties and making as much noise as possible, until the culprit lost his patience and tried to shut me up. — Ilona Andrews

Farts come from no
one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong
to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the
room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is
denial. — Paul Auster

The real thing that keeps men and women apart, is fear. Women blame men and men blame women, but the culprit is fear, women are afraid of one thing, men are afraid of a different thing; the fears of women have to do with losing while the fears of men have to do with not being good enough for something. One is loss, the other is insecurity. Men are innately more insecure than women and women are innately more needful of companionship than men. It's good for both men and women to be able to recognize and identify these fears not only within themselves, but within each other, and then men and women will see that they really do need to help each other. It's not a game, it's not a competition, the two sexes need one another. — C. JoyBell C.

Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs — Tom Waits

I go to the chair of government with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution. — George Washington

According to one medical researcher, poor breathing plays a role in more than 75 percent of the ills people bring to their doctors. In most cases, poor diaphragmatic breathing is the culprit. On — Gay Hendricks

Dietary fat was singled out as the most villainous culprit responsible for weight gain and declining health. The food industry adjusted by replacing saturated animal fats with "heart healthy," super-processed vegetable seed oils, and high fructose corn syrup. Soon, our average body weight started to rise, and it did so quickly. — Scott Abel

There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank," he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers' dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, "she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away. — Sy Montgomery

XVI. Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the culprit, - Life! — Emily Dickinson

And thus it was a right old shambles as anyone could see. Call it Chaos, if you like, the state of affairs when Love went wrong. And everyone wanted to know who the culprit was, who had stolen what rightfully belonged to Hephaestus. And as Zeus was non-commital in the matter, Hera naturally suspected him as the culprit. But the Goddesses agreed that the baby when born, would naturally resemble his father. And thus, when Priapus was born, the culprit would be exposed. — Nicholas Chong

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen

And please don't sink into this woeful nonsense about not having time to read ... The real culprit here is almost never your schedule. It is your boredom
your boredom with the books you think you are supposed to read. Find a book you want, a book that gives you real trembling excitement, a book that is hot in your hands, and you'll have time galore. — Stephen Koch

His transcendent sense of worth had risen and caught up to him. He did not like the world he lived in, and the people in it. He was just as much a victim as he was a culprit of the seven deadly sins. — Soroosh Shahrivar

I'm not one for speeches."
A few feet behind me Torres calls out, "Riiiiight."
The crowd laughs and Coach whirls around like he's searching for the culprit. Torres is the picture of innocence, and I sigh and shake my head when he grins at me.
"Fine. I'm not one for speeches that don't involve yelling. — Cora Carmack

Nila was the culprit - my undoing. She melted me. She was the fucking sun. And I was about to splash out her heat. — Pepper Winters

Violence against women can end only when the culprits get punished. — Mukhtar Ma'i

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one. — Graham Moore

Fear is the culprit that robs us of our greatest lives. And although it's mostly made up or a learned behavior from our past, almost everybody I've ever met in my life struggles with fear. — Debbie Ford

We're conditioned in this country to believe that if there's a problem, the black man is usually the culprit. — Wesley Snipes

There is a wide distinction between confessing sin as a culprit, and confessing sin as a child. The Father's bosom is the place for penitent confessions. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

PERFECTIONISM Perfectionism is a family system rule and a core culprit in creating toxic shame. We see it also in both the religious and cultural systems. Perfectionism denies healthy shame. It does so by assuming we can be perfect. Such an assumption denies our human finitude because it denies the fact that we are essentially limited. Perfectionism denies that we will often make mistakes — John Bradshaw

What was happening was the war on drugs. That was the primary culprit I could see that was getting in the way of black progress. — Eugene Jarecki

Know that Truth sees through bullshit. So if you can't handle looking at Truth, you must be a Devil's culprit. — Suzy Kassem

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness. — Alan Bradley

We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization. — Paul Broun

We don't really know how the game was invented, though there are suspicions. As soon as we discover the culprits, we'll let you know — Bruce Pandolfini

In 1911 the little town of Nakhla in Egypt was the scene of one of the most remarkable events in historym when a chunk of rock fell from the sky and killed a dog. This is the only known canine fatality caused by a cosmic object. Improbably though this encounter was already, its truly extraordinary nature was revealed only decades later when scientists found that the culprit was not a common-or-garden meteorite, but a piece of the planet Mars. — Paul Davies

It is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit. The worst culprit is the Gregorian calendar, and by extension the "12:60 frequency" that it fosters - together these have become, in essence, the inescapable time clock of globalist capitalism. — Jose Arguelles

Our current contempt for poverty stems from information overload--this is the enabler---our over education as privileged people-- perhaps the real culprit--and our secret assurance that we ourselves owe no one anything beyond the exhausting daily round. We will defend our lack of idealism to anyone and be horrifyingly well received in this age. Indeed, many so called financial "philosophies" are in fact nothing more than elaborate justification for one petty selfishness after the next. — John Thomas Allen

In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that explained why taxis could charge customers exorbitant prices for dismal service. The simple reason, according to the 176-page study: lack of competition in the market. The culprit: local governments. — Marvin Ammori

As it is with every Life experience,
from the cradle to the grave,
Curiosity, is the culprit,
and always leads the way. — D. O'Brien

Simply calling the Great Fire an accident did not satisfy some people, most notably the local newspapers. They demanded a culprit-- — Jim Murphy