Quotes About Scapegoats

#1. They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.

Harlan Ellison

#2. Congress has really set this thing up in a way that they absolve themselves of blame, They have their scapegoats. They can blame the Pentagon. They can blame BRAC. It's hard for voters to say this is Ortiz's fault.

Juan Carlos I Of Spain

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

Jacques Barzun

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

Frank Herbert

#5. 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.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#6. 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.

Desmond Tutu

#7. Too often, when people are in trouble they look for scapegoats.

Miep Gies

#8. 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.

Simon R. Green

#9. Politicians today vow, "Never again!" But they will naturally focus only on dealing with a few scapegoats, not just because the system is harder to change, but also because if politicians traced the fault lines, they would find a few running through themselves.

Raghuram G. Rajan

#10. But it does imply that the search for scapegoats - a particularly alluring pastime in individualistic cultures such as ours in the United States - is a blind alley.

Peter M. Senge

#11. People are upset. They know something is wrong. But they don't know what. The real explanation is too complicated. They won't sit still for it. So, they look for scapegoats - the rich ... the banks ... the Chinese.

Bill Bonner

#12. She's nothing to do with my shit, but fuck it, none of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy.

Irvine Welsh

#13. 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.

Brandon Sanderson

#14. It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself....
If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals.

Shelley Jackson

#15. When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats. I just do not believe that barbed-wire fences or guns on our border will solve any of our problems.

Ron Paul

#16. How long shall we Spiritualists be turned over like so many scapegoats to the unbelievers, by cheating mediums and speculating prophets?

H. P. Blavatsky

#17. 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.

Agona Apell

#18. It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#19. 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.

Michael Grant

#20. 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.

David Sarnoff

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

Jonathan Davis

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

Michael Chabon

#23. 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.

Wyndham Lewis

#24. Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats, well here I am.

Marilyn Manson

#25. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.

James G. Frazer

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

Mark Twain

#27. 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.

C.J. Sansom

#28. 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.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Michael Lewis

#30. Young people often serve as scapegoats for the challenges communities face. At the same time, they are routinely pushed away from connecting to their communities as serious problem-solvers capable of changing the world.

Adam Fletcher

#31. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.

Northrop Frye

#32. A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.

Charlie Jane Anders

#33. For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

Thomas More

#34. The best way to avoid becoming a scapegoat is to find one.

Warren Eyster

#35. No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.

Sophocles