These scapegoat quotes will inspire you. Scapegoat, someone who is blamed or punished for another’s faults or actions or a person who is blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging scapegoat quotes, scapegoat sayings, and scapegoat proverbs.
Best Scapegoat Quotes
- “The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Some people are desperately looking for scapegoats, they just don’t want to see the truth!” ~ Jonathan Davis
- “Stop looking for a scapegoat in your life but be willing to face the truth within yourself & right your own wrongs” ~ Eileen Caddy , Life scapegoat quotes
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“Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.” ~ Ernest Bevin
- “Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.” ~ Edward Hoagland
- “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
- “The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man’s ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.” ~ Francois Mauriac
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“Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.” ~ Mignon McLaughlin
- “It’s too easy to criticize a man when he’s out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else’s mistakes.” ~ Leo Tolstoy
- “He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “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
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“A person who smiles in the face of adversity…probably has a scapegoat.” ~ Stephen Hawking
- “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
- “Too often, when people are in trouble they look for scapegoats.” ~ Miep Gies
- “The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“I could not ask forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.” ~ Daphne du Maurier
- “The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.” ~ Jeff Flake
- “To me, it doesn’t matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say ‘No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
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“The artist is the world’s scapegoat.” ~ Jacob Epstein
- “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices . . . . And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.” ~ Rod Serling
- “It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.” ~ Richard Hofstadter
- “This traditionally happens in Russia and in every other undemocratic country as well – the quest for a scapegoat won’t be long, either. The easiest way to find a scapegoat is to ascribe that role to former governments.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“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
- “Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our response – the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. . . . Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.” ~ Dan Millman , Blame scapegoat quotes
- “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
- “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
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“Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats, well here I am.” ~ Marilyn Manson
- “Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Political parties often take advantage of denial and fear in a moment of change. This is a well understood phenomenon that often leads to scapegoat-ism: blaming outsiders, such as immigrants, or racial and religious minorities. The phenomenon is behind Brexit and the violence in the political cycles in the US and EU.” ~ Graciela Chichilnisky
- “For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.” ~ Susan Faludi
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“The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.” ~ James G. Frazer
- “Donald Trump creates scapegoats in Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” ~ Mitt Romney , Family scapegoat quotes
- “The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.” ~ John Bradshaw
- “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
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“There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.” ~ Rod Serling
- “Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It’s hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.” ~ Michael Lewis
- “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
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“There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.” ~ Mark Twain
- “The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation, but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoats – such as Jews or heretics or witches – hunted down and burned.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.” ~ Lionel Shriver
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“The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
- “The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “The president is the country’s scapegoat more than the country’s leader; the president has as much power as we think the president has. Whoever has the most money is the puppet master.” ~ Eric Andre
- “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” ~ Monica Lewinsky
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“In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.” ~ Andrew Lam
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“The courts are an easy scapegoat because at a time when everything has to boiled down to easy slogans, we speak in subtleties.” ~ Rose Bird
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “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
- “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins 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
- “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
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“I do not intend to be made the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society.” ~ Victoria Woodhull
- “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
- “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
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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
- “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
- “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
