Scapegoat Quotes - Page 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

  Hard Work, Depth, May

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• 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

  Real, People, Upset

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• I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat.

  Ice Cube

  Rap, Thinking, Games

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• Blaming the imperialists nowadays is obviously absurd, as is blaming the Americans, who obviously don't have the slightest desire to control anything in the Middle East. The American desire is to get out as quickly as possible and the general view is that now that the Cold War is over and the Soviets are no longer a problem, we have no reason to stay there, let's get out. They will have to confront their own problems. Israel provides a useful scapegoat but it's a limited one.

  Bernard Lewis

  War, Desire, Blame

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• In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.

  Andrew Lam

  War, Terrorism, Immigrants

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• It takes courage and intelligence, you know, to do the stages of Yoga right, and to start with this Hatha Yoga… It’s just you and nothing but you, standing in one spot frozen like a statue with no place to go for help or excuse or scapegoat except inward.

  Bikram Choudhury

  Yoga, Inward, Frozen

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• 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

  Real, Mean, Destiny

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham, Jean O'Grady, David Staines (2003). “Northrop Frye on Canada”, p.416, University of Toronto Press

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• What would become of the world without the Devil? Under all the different systems of religion that have guided or misguided the world for the last six thousand years, the Devil has been the grand scapegoat. He has had to bear the blame of every thing that has gone wrong. All the evil that gets committed is laid to his door, and he has, besides, the credit of hindering all the good that has never got done at all. If mankind were not thus one and all victims to the Devil, what an irredeemable set of scoundrels they would be obliged to confess themselves!

  Geraldine Jewsbury

  Doors, Years, Evil

  Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury (1845). “Zoe: The History of Two Lives”, p.90

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• For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

  Ellen Willis

  Crush, Zero, Mistake

  "Dreaming of War". "The Nation", October 15, 2001.

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• The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

  Mary McCarthy

  Guilt, Yoke, Lambs

  Mary McCarthy (1975). “The company she keeps”, Not Avail

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• The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn't he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured?

  Richard Dawkins

  Fear, Son, Views

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• Using some economic issues to make one group of people, regardless of race or religion, the scapegoat for all the problems of the country is just the stupidest, and yet, the most creative propaganda scheme that you can come up with.

  Immortal Technique

  Country, Race, Issues

  "The Transcendence of Hip Hop - An Interview with Immortal Technique". Interview with Chris Grosso, theindiespiritualist.com. February 20, 2014.

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• The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

  Ayn Rand

  Business, Class, Evil

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.74, Penguin

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• 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

  Believe, Gun, Wire

  "Paul: Immigration not solved by barbed wire, guns" by Beth Fouhy, www.deseretnews.com. February 1, 2012.

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• Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Sex, Hate, Hands

  "Revolt in 2100". Book by Robert A. Heinlein, 1953.

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• In most of the countries in the Muslim world today, most of them are autocratic regimes that are unpopular if not detested by their people. They need a scapegoat and for a long time the imperialist served that purpose.

  Bernard Lewis

  Country, Long, People

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• I think one of the reasons anti-immigration state laws start to happen is they happen in states where there is an enormous influx. In these places, the dominant culture, the Anglo culture has held sway for such a very, very long time. Now, they are living in another culture, another language. They fear losing dominance and control. It is sadly human nature to find a group to scapegoat. This happens throughout man's history.

  Rilla Askew

  Thinking, Long, Culture

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Bankers were scapegoats for the whole Reagan-Thatcher era, which exalted finance and humbled industry, and which had allowed the fruits of progress to accrue disproportionately to the rich and super-rich.

  Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

  Progress, Finance, Rich

  "Keynes: The Return of the Master". Book by Robert Skidelsky, September 2009.

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• There's a big thing right now with people using stand-up as a scapegoat. People think comedians have the power to change someone in an hour. If we had that ability, the art would not be legal. It would too dangerous.

  Bill Burr

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

  Susan Faludi

  Real, Dark, Past

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• Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

  Michael Lewis

  Wall, Made, Crisis

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• 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

  Voters, Way, Faults

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• The most active period of the witchcraft trials coincides with a period of lower than average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age"...In a time period when the reasons for changes in weather were largely a mystery, people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns. 'Witches' became target for blame because there was an existing cultural framework that both allowed their persecution and suggested that they could control the weather.

  Emily Oster

  Average, Ice, Weather

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• For most countries, serving the UN's objectives has never seemed worth even the smallest of risks. Member nations do not want a large, reputable, strong and independent United Nations, no matter their hypocritical pronouncements otherwise. What they want is a weak, beholden, indebted scapegoat of an organization, which they can blame for their failures or steal victories from.

  Roméo Dallaire

  Country, Strong, Independent

  "Shake Hands with the Devil". Book by Roméo Dallaire, 2003.

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• Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.

  Frantz Fanon

  Civilization, White, Guilt

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.194, Pluto Press

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