Scapegoat Quotes

1. "The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them."
Author: Aung San Suu Kyi

2. "She adapted herself to the split-second rhythm of the New Yorker going to and from work. Getting to the office was a nervous ordeal. If she arrived one minute before nine, she was a free person. If she arrived one minute after, she worried because that made her the logical scapegoat of the boss if he happened to be in a bad mood that day."
Author: Betty Smith

3. "If a player won't shoulder responsibility, he won't work on his weaknesses, which means he won't improve. He'll be constantly on the prowl for a fall guy or a scapegoat, and his teammates becomes epidemic."
Author: Bill Parcels

4. "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."
Author: C.J. Sansom

5. "I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

6. "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."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

8. "Scapegoat, n.I think our top two are:1. Not enough coffee.2. Too much coffee."
Author: David Levithan

9. "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the crimes of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value."
Author: David Sarnoff

10. "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."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

11. "The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions."
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower

12. "I couldn't very well make a special delivery to the door of the constabulary now could I? And he'd have made the perfect scapegoat. That aura of misery he wraps himself in. So Byronesque. He's too immersed in his own guilt to ever suspect it in another."
Author: Ella J. Fraser

13. "Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat."
Author: Ernest Bevin

14. "He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

15. "The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle."
Author: Gilles Deleuze

16. "It is easy to dump all the problems and responsibilities of a family on a single member. Yet when we look at David's family we can see that the whole family needed to deal with a number of issues. Let's look at a few of them: 1. Each member of the family has hurts. Each member of the family needs help. There is no such thing as a scapegoat. It is easy for a family to designate one of its own."
Author: Henry Cloud

17. "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."
Author: Henry Louis Gates

18. "A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel."
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "She's nothing to do with my shit, but fuck it, none of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy."
Author: Irvine Welsh

20. "Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat's back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge."
Author: J.M. Coetzee

21. "To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one's scapegoats."
Author: Jacques Barzun

22. "If business doesn't thrive, it hurts America. We need improved relations, more collaboration, more thought and more consistency as we go about trying to make sure we have the best country in the world. Not scapegoating and finger-pointing."
Author: Jamie Dimon

23. "The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic."
Author: John Bradshaw

24. "Some people are desperately looking for scapegoats, they just don't want to see the truth!"
Author: Jonathan Davis

25. "Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better."
Author: Lionel Shriver

26. "Gets blamed for a lot of things, does the weather. Convenient scapegoat, if you ask me."
Author: Martin Edwards

27. "Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us."
Author: Meghna Pant

28. "Caine erupted in disbelieving laughter. "Yeah, that'll do it. 'I'm just a kid, Your Honor!' Hah. They'll have to find a few scapegoats, and guess who it will be? You and me, surfer boy. You and me."
Author: Michael Grant

29. "The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too."
Author: Michael Lewis

30. "And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the "viciousness" of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the nark-squad hero, I'm saddened. Because it isn't Margo and it isn't Max who keeps the traffic moving: it's that same nark-squad hero with a small, brown paper bag that hustlers and pushers alike have to keep filled if they want to stay on the street."
Author: Nelson Algren

31. "It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat."
Author: Richard Hofstadter

32. "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."
Author: Richard Rohr

33. "Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame. Even as Ken prayed for my soul, he did it in a way that welcomed me into the church rather than made me a scapegoat of Christian fear or an example of what not to become," (p 14)."
Author: Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

34. "Some seem to think that Jesuits are behind everything, without any evidence whatsoever. That is not thinking, that is scapegoating."
Author: Sienna McQuillen

35. "Sewers are necessary to guarantee the wholesomeness of palaces, according to the Fathers of the Church. And it has often been remarked that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles. One of the arguments in support of slavery, advanced by the American supporters of the institution, was that the Southern whites, being all freed from servile duties, could maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves; in the same way, a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with the most chivalrous respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her. Whether she is put legally under police supervision or works illegally in secret, she is in any case treated as a pariah."
Author: Simone De Beauvoir

36. "Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame."
Author: Susan Forward

37. "By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!"
Author: Timothy Ferriss

38. "If I still need someone to calm my anger down,then I surely need a scapegoat who enrages me."
Author: Toba Beta

39. "..the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer..."
Author: Virginia Woolf

40. "Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness."
Author: Virginia Woolf

41. "The first domesticated animal was the scapegoat."
Author: Yanko Tsvetkov

Scapegoat Quotes Pictures