Quotes About Scapegoats

Henry of England had all the virtues and all the faults, and solved the contradiction by making scapegoats and sin-eaters of half his entourage.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

And with symbolism we can create meaningless metaphysics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on medicating us. With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.

I'd request politicians to stop diverting attention from the actual issues that affect the country. Please stop resorting to soft targets like singers and musicians as scapegoats.

Each culture probably needs its own scapegoats as expressions of society's ills. Just as the hysterics of Freud's day exemplified the sexual repression of that era, the borderline, whose identity is split into many pieces, represents the fracturing of stable units in our society.2

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam.

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

We have such a culture of discrimination and hatred, and one that has scapegoats and affects people so extremely. That's something that very easily crosses borders.

Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders.

There'll always be small, bitter people ready to follow some charismatic leader who promises them peace and happiness through justified violence and the killing of scapegoats.

Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.

Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats—after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator.

Some people are desperately looking for scapegoats, they just don't want to see the truth!

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

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.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one's scapegoats.

New York Times writer Louis Sass put it this way: Each culture probably needs its own scapegoats as expressions of society's ills. Just as the hysterics of Freud's day exemplified the sexual repression of that era, the borderline, whose identity is split into many pieces, represents the fracturing of stable units in our society.2 Though

Whichever came first—the act or the myth—human sacrifice is one of history's oldest locomotives. Much of literature is about scapegoats: comedy is the story of expulsion from the point of view of society; tragedy is the same story from the point of view of the outcast.

The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus' innocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims.

It was relatively easy, we now realize, to categorize countries and nations. You knew who your enemies were and whom you could count on as collaborators and friends. And even more importantly, you had ready-made scapegoats to take the blame when things were going wrong.