Quotes About Scapegoating

Modern politics has become little more than shirking responsibility and blaming somebody else.

The public is blaming the city officials, who in turn have to find someone else to blame. It's the nature of the beast. If the police, the politicians, can pass the buck on down the line, they will.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.

But now they would believe Hamid was responsible for the death of Mamie. It suited the stories they told themselves about the dark-skinned man, the foreigner, the outsider, the Muslim.

La responsabilidad siempre es ajena, y es tan fácil esparcirla…

In a culture fueled by burnout, a culture that has run itself down, our national resilience becomes compromised. And when our collective immune system is weakened, we become more susceptible to viruses that are part of every culture because they're part of human nature - fear-mongering, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery.

It has become routine for national politicians to blame Europe. When something works, they claim it as their success. When something doesn't work, then Europe is to blame.

Only a cheap politician, greedy for political gain, would try to single out one individual for blame. The fault lies not with the individual but with the system, and that system is Richard Nixon.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

intellectual…and even religious.

We are ready to deconstruct anything except the idea that we are self-directed and that the persecutors are always the others.

It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need. Maud knew the proprietor of the Mail, Lord Northcliffe. Like all great press men, he really believed the drivel he published. His talent was to express his readers' most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.

It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need.

Fascism blames problems on a false cause—people of other races.

Dac? porneÈ™ti o vân?toare de vr?jitoare, trebuie s? g?seÈ™ti È™i niÈ™te vr?jitoare.

They didn't have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.

And how easy this mechanism is to see in others! Can we see it in ourselves? That is the question. Who are your scapegoats? What do you reject in others that you secretly reject in yourself? Weakness? Failure? Fear? Homosexuality? Violence? What thoughts and feelings do you not admit in yourself, in order to hold up to the world an image of who you are?

The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.

The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners.

When it comes to pinning blame, pin the tail on the donkeys.

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

As Korzybski said once (violating his own ideal of E-Prime) "Allness is an illness." In fact, the F-scale, invented by Adorno and used to measure fascist tendencies, does show a correlation between heavy use of "allness" statements and the fascist personality. Can you imagine a full page by any fascist (or any red fascist) without reckless generalizations about all members of some scapegoat group?

Se você quiser manter qualquer grupo humano isolado – mulheres, judeus, ciganos, gays, negros –, a melhor forma é convencer todos de que essas pessoas são fonte de contaminação.