Scapegoating Quotes

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich - being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. ~ Romain Gary

He is an unsuccessful scapegoat whose heroic willingness to die for the truth will ultimately make the entire cycle of satanic violence visible to all people and therefore inoperative. The "kingdom of Satan" will give way to the "kingdom of God." Thanks to Jesus' death, the Spirit of God, alias the Paraclete (a word that signifies "the lawyer for the defense"), wins a foothold in the kingdom of Satan. He reveals the innocence of Jesus to the disciples first and then to all of us. The defense of victims is both a moral imperative and the source of our increasing power to demystify scapegoating. The Passion accounts reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus' death is much greater than we realize, and Paul's exalted idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound. The ~ Rene Girard

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. ~ Richard Rohr

The evidence of "forgiveness of sin" is not found in a profession of belief, but in a life freed from self-destructive pursuits, scapegoating, and violence. ~ Peter Rollins

On the playground, "cooties" seems harmless and innocuous (unless you've been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is "the demonization of the 'Other' in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants." These deviants are considered to be "deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness." Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating "monsters" who are threatening to society. ~ Richard Beck

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid. ~ Rene Girard

Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Deming argued that if there are performance problems and quality defects, one needs to understand how those problems arise almost naturally as a consequence of how a system has been designed - and then fix those design flaws. Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system - whether or not they deserved it. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself. ~ Philip Roth

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. ~ Charles Stross

I have clients who are nowhere near as insane as their family is, but they're the people who have been targeted with the mental illnesses because that's convenient for everyone involved. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions - the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions - the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form - the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people.

Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn't hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people - but only because he first hates them in himself ~ Ken Wilber

Many people have been pontificating, and patronizing, and moralizing, and scapegoating, saying you Greeks, you are the problem. I would say we Greeks have a problem. We are not the problem. ~ George Papandreou

Evil was defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. We scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to so misuse their power, they must have the power to use in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims. The most common relationship of dominion is that of parent over child. Children are weak, defenseless, and trapped in relation to their parents. They are born in thrall to their parents ... They are simply not free or powerful enough to escape. ~ M. Scott Peck

The problem with letting people tear your walls down, is that you never know who wants to take down those walls just for the fun of it. For amusement purposes. Just to say that he knew that he could. At the end of the day ... the things you build should stay built. And you are no scapegoat for the sins of other people, in anyone's life. How dare anyone take down your walls not in order to see you; but only in order to feed their ego. In order to make you pay for sins not done by your own hands. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity ~ Julia Serano

Crazy how so many British people can walk into Tesco, see 30 self-service checkouts, and still believe that it's immigrants who are taking all the jobs. ~ Fuad Alakbarov

Stop scapegoating immigrants[Stop using] outrageous phrases like 'illegal aliens.' ~ Howard Dean

It's easy to blame traffic jam
when you're late and in a hurry. ~ Toba Beta

There ought to be a thoughtful welfare-reform debate that doesn't turn into something that could be called scapegoating. ~ Jack Kemp

I was in denial of the glaring reality that my existence depended on my willingness to comply with the family policy of me earning the splinter of space they granted to me. ~ M. Wakefield

If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy. But ~ Brian McLaren

When there's change, and people fear things, they become more dogmatic in their views. They lash out: you can see it in the media, scapegoating and penal sentencing. ~ Samantha Harvey

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

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. ~ Jamie Dimon

You can always somebody who is worse than you are to make you feel virtuous. It's a cheap shot: those awful terrorists, perverts, communists
they are the ones who need to repent! Yes, indeed they do, and for them repentance will be a full-time job, exactly as it is for all the rest of us. ~ Hugh Nibley

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It's why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won't notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image. ~ Jack Gilbert

If brainstorming becomes 'blamestorming' by reason of time pressure or on account of pure laziness, the truth may be assaulted and unyieldingly vilified . Blamestorming becomes then downright a perfidious appeal to scapegoating with a torrent of frantic manhunts for 'culprits on duty'. ('Blamestorming') ~ Erik Pevernagie