Quotes About Scapegoat

It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate

Los quiteños salen a las calles y se acodan para gozar del espectáculo. La vieja está aterrada. Va a las ancas de una mula, amarrada, para que no se escape. Le han vestido con el escapulario de sambenito, le han cortado el pelo a rape, le han echado cenizas sobre el cráneo, le han puesto cadenas en las piernas y en los brazos. La multitud la culpa de todas las calamidades. Le escupen y escarnecen. La vieja no sabe lo que pasa, ni siquiera para qué la llevan a la ciudad de Lima.

The cigarette gets the credit for everything and the blame for nothing.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

Alfred Dreyfus had been a scapegoat because he was at once a Jew and a vampire.

Every club has its scapegoats, but some are easier targets than others.

Eventually the person who tries to fix the problem will be blamed for causing it.

If the scapegoat appears too weak and his punishment too cruel, you may end up the victim of your own device.

Excuses satisfy no one and apologies make everyone uncomfortable. The mistake does not vanish with an apology; it deepens and festers. Better to cut it off instantly, distract attention from yourself, and focus attention on a convenient scapegoat before people have time to ponder your responsibility or your possible incompetence.

The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong.

Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.

Why, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn't be in Bill's place for a good deal.

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.

I ain't gonna be no escape-goat!

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero-worship, if the circumstances are favourable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavourable, of persecuting a scapegoat

Melania and the White House had accused me of criminal activity, had publicly shamed and fired me, and made me their scapegoat.

The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community.

You know, sometimes it's nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.

It seems a universal rule in this world that people will always look for victims and scapegoats, does it not? Especially at times of difficulty and tension.

Hitler was therefore determined to trump the enemy in the art of propaganda. He was a brilliant popular orator and drew huge crowds. He knew there was no better way to incite a mob to action than to give them a scapegoat, someone they could blame for their suffering, and he found one in the Jews.

Let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices -- to be found in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children … and the children yet unborn. (a pause) And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone!