Blame Quotes - Page 31

• If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

  Angela Carter

  Able, Barbarians, Ifs

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• For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  People, Forever, Advice

  Kazuo Ishiguro (2010). “The Remains of the Day”, p.244, Vintage

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• I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Simple, Reality, Views

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• Well, coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment. You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.

  Bill Watterson

  Disappointment, People, Risk

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• A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?

  Chinua Achebe

  Men, Doe, Lips

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.118, Anchor

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• Blame the guy who doesn't speak Engish.

  Homer

  Guy, Speak

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• When one is deprived of ones liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.

  Thucydides

  Men, Liberty, Use

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• To be turned from one's course by men's opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold an office.

  Fabius Maximus

  Men, Office, Opinion

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• Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.'

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Mean, Loss, Rome

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• So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

  John Berryman

  Vanity, Self, Talking

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• O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Criticism, Breakfast

  Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson, Joanne Trautmann, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Flight of the Mind”

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• I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don’t ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.

  Harlan Ellison

  Believe, Silly, Thinking

  44 Copy quote

• The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can.but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Mean, Men, Wish

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• People of poor character tend to blame their choices on circumstances. Ethical people make good choices regardless of circumstances. If they make enough good choices, they begin to create better conditions for themselves.

  John C. Maxwell

  Character, People, Choices

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• If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans of the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Reality, Thinking, America

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• In hell, sinners shall forever lay all the blame on their own wills. Hell is a rational torment by conscience.

  Richard Baxter

  Forever, Hell, Rational

  "The Saint's Everlasting Rest: Or a Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in Their Enjoyment of God in Heaven". Book by Richard Baxter. Chapter: "The People Who Receive the Saints' Rest", 1650.

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• Whoever wishes to blame or attack me is entitled to do so. I regret I didn't have enough experience to totally control the movement. On the other hand, with our constant struggle, this had to be done together with others in the communist world to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese.

  Pol Pot

  Regret, Struggle, Hands

  "Day of Reckoning". "Far Eastern Economic Review" Magazine, October 1997.

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• Man and woman and speech and deed and city and object should be honored with praise if praiseworthy and incur blame if unworthy, for it is an equal error and mistake to blame the praisable and to praise the blamable.

  Gorgias

  Mistake, Men, Errors

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• Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.

  Clive James

  Artist, Want, Facts

  Clive James (2015). “The Crystal Bucket”, p.87, Pan Macmillan

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• And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

  David Levithan

  Thinking, People, Devil

  David Levithan (2013). “Every Day”, p.89, Egmont UK

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• Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.

  Zaha Hadid

  Men, Thinking, Long

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• South Africans have no concept of time and this is also why we can't solve poverty and social problems… It's now 10 years since the fall of the Apartheid government and we cannot blame Apartheid for being tardy.

  Nelson Mandela

  Fall, Government, Years

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• You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth

  Wangari Maathai

  Technology, Order, Skills

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• Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?

  Diogenes

  Path, Existence, Ashamed

  "Anthology (Book 3)". Book by Joannes Stobaeus, 1536.

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• We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.

  Moshe Dayan

  Country, Names, Village

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