Quotes About Scapegoat

As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he'd always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.

Never underestimate how soothing it is to have someone else to blame.

But it was no exaggeration, he'd witnessed this very thing in a market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey's tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!

People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why is it us? Why couldn't it be, I don't know, a Dakota or something? Why not Florida?

could serve as a political elixir: everything that went awry could be, and was, blamed on the Jews.

The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat.

There's a lot of administrator and ex-administrators and board of regents from Baylor that say that Art Briles was a scapegoat at Baylor. I've had calls from ex-chairmen of the board of regents there, current big booster there, lawyers that represent Baylor. I have not had one negative call about Art Briles.

The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events. Equally

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.

Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand.

forward-looking accountability."2 Accountability that is backward-looking (often the kind in trials or lawsuits) tries to find a scapegoat, to blame and shame an individual for messing up. But accountability is about looking ahead. Not only should accountability acknowledge the mistake and the harm resulting from it, it should lay out the opportunities (and responsibilities!) for making changes so that the probability of such harm happening again goes down.

Part of the manager's job is to act as scapegoat, shielding his club's owners from blame.

The battle rages eternal, though the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of those discriminated against changes regularly. Maybe man's need for a scapegoat is genetically programmed into him.

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be: the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer—which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself. We have made it the scapewolf for our own sins.

What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, "It's all your fault!

The gaslighting parent usually has a "golden child" and a "scapegoat child." The former can do no wrong, whereas the latter can do no right. This pits siblings against each other, and these feelings of competition commonly extend into adulthood.

For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

I'll tell you something: my dad was a nuclear engineer and he was really bright, and I've always said that because of negotiating at such a young age with my dad, it was really such a gift because I could then negotiate with very difficult personalities - and not end up being the scapegoat. I learned to really pick and choose my battles.

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

She had hoped he would be an unpleasant man who was a blatant manifestation of his offensive views. Instead, she'd found something much more dangerous. An articulate person who invited trust and was able to provide simple answers. Someone who could help the voters identify a scapegoat and then promise to make it disappear.

We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors, and producers—swept up with the rest of us—will shy away from real skeptical scrutiny. He won't be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he'll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos's.

When everything goes wrong in our lives, it's natural to look around for someone -or something- to blame.

I was a scapegoat. The media had to put responsibility on somebody, and I was chosen. They felt free to say that because someone was thin they were anorexic, which is ridiculous.