#scapegoat

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#anti-semitism #been #desperate #economic #i

If I still need someone to calm my anger down, then I surely need a scapegoat who enrages me. ↗

— Toba Beta

#angry #point-finger #scapegoat #self-control #anger

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. ↗

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

#hunting #scapegoating #blame

I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man. ↗

— Edward Zwick

#always #america #boogie #easy #find

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

— Michael Lewis

#being #enough #hard #local #play

I was a scapegoat. The media had to put responsibility on somebody, and I was chosen. They felt free to say that because someone was thin they were anorexic, which is ridiculous. ↗

— Kate Moss

#because #chosen #felt #free #had

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat. ↗

— Ernest Bevin

#intelligent people #look #people #scapegoat #unintelligent

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

#manners #politics #punishment #scapegoats #thieves

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews? ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #decay #end-of-the-world #genocide #god-s-wrath

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think taht we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#hate #scapegoat #treaty-of-versailles #versailles #world-war-i