Quotessence
Home / Topics / Scapegoat Quotes

Scapegoat Quotes

Browse 141 quotes about Scapegoat.

Related topics

PeopleProblemThinkingBlameCountryMenSinEconomicKnowsLooksMadeWayWorld

Scapegoat Quotes

“Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other. Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism. All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.”

RacismIndifferenceScapegoatAntiracismAutistic Culture
Book:The Perfect Crime
Create image

“We all need role models in different seasons, people we look to who bring encouragement for the journey. Every role model but One will fail. If we get up-close we will see that each one is imperfect, except the One perfect lamb who was crucified for our sins. He was the scapegoat. He was the rejected One.”

JesusChristianityJourneyJesus ChristEncouragementRole ModelsImperfectChristian LivingRejectedEncouragement QuotesChristian QuotesScapegoatCrucifiedDifferent Seasons
Book:9 Traits of a Life-Giving Mom: Replacing My Worst with Gods Best
Create image

“People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody’s back. They grow angry. They turn violent. To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes.”

LifePhilosophyLife LessonsEvilFearHuman NatureJudgmentBlameConformityUnknownScapegoatLearn From The PastHistory Repeating Itself
Book:If I Resist
Create image

“A life as long as the Minotaur's - that half-man half-bull, and fully scapegoat - a life that long doubles back on itself from time to time. Caves in. The minuscule tectonics of being alive, among the wholly human, always unsettling. The world shifts continuously beneath his feet. The Minotaur came from misspent want, from the planked birth canal, came from blood-drenched stone walls, from yellow thread. Belayed by desire, the beast pulled himself along. Pulled himself through centuries, through zeitgeists and kitchens, through paradigms and junkyards. Pulls still. Home.”

WantBirthConnectionScapegoatUnsettlingThe MinotaurKitchensMisspent WantTectonicsZeitgeists
Book:The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time
Create image

“Inspired by the Book of Leviticus, the artist saw the goat as an archetype for Jesus Christ, the "suffering servant of God," who carried our sins with his cross as an act of redemptive suffering. Thus, the Lamb of God is the Last Scapegoat.”

ChristianitySacrificeRedemptionAtonementScapegoatBlack SheepLamb Of GodScapegoatingSacrifice Of ChristWilliam Holman Hunt
Book:Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays
Create image

“If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaNarcissistic AbuseScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.”

ChildhoodParentsRejectionChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipEmotional NeglectAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“If your mother lived your life as though it were her own-never allowing you a moment of stress or frustration, routinely sleeping in your bed when you had a bad dream, never setting limits or establishing boundaries, seldom or never letting you out of her sight, excusing and failing to provide consequences for your negative or hurtful behaviour, insisting on a daily chronicle of every detail of your life, all in the name of maternal love-then you never had to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. You remain a child.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment TraumaEngulfing Mother
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Having scanned the faces of the spectators, Andre mounted the wagon, stood on the coffin, removed his hat, and lowered his shirt collar. "It will be but a momentary pang,' Dr. James Thacher heard him say. Seizing the noose, Andre brought it over his head, tied a knot under his left ear, and placed a handkerchief over his eyes. When asked for his last words, the British officer raised his handkerchief. 'I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”

BraveryAmerican RevolutionScapegoatHangingBenedict ArnoldNooseJohn AndreBritish Officer
Book:Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married
Create image

“Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame.”

FamilyBlameScapegoatBad Parents
Book:Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
Create image

“This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem.”

WarInjusticeDystopiaScapegoatClass SystemSocial Politics
Author:S. J. Kincaid
Create image

“imagine a world, however, where coin tosses could not be repeated and there was no way of knowing weather a particular coin toss involved either a scrupulously fair coin, or one that was double-header, or double-tailed. this would represent a world that was more than just risky, it would be deeply uncertain. imagine that all decisions in this world were governed by this fundamentally uncertain coin tosses, on an entirely random basis. some people may do very well, where as others may fail very badly indeed. both the winners and the losers might then be tempted to form their own narratives to explain their successes and failures, the winners extolling their imaginary skills, the losers blaming the winners for their imaginary exploitation.”

PoliticsCampaignsNarrativeDecision MakingManipulationMisinformationScapegoatRandom Decision
Book:Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
Create image

“Nobody will read what I say here, no one will come to help me; even if all the people were commanded to help me, every door and window would remain shut, everybody would take to bed and draw the bed-clothes over his head, the whole earth would become an inn for the night. And there is sense in that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone knew he would not know where I could be found, and if he knew where I could be found, he would not know how to deal with me, he would not know how to help me. The thought of helping me is an illness that has to be cured by taking to one's bed. ("The Hunter Gracchus")”

ScapegoatPariah
Author:Franz Kafka
Create image

“In a verbally abusive relationship, the partner learns to tolerate abuse without realizing it and to lose self-esteem without realizing it. She is blamed by the abuser and becomes the scapegoat. The partner is then the victim.”

Domestic ViolenceEmotional AbuseScapegoatAbusive RelationshipsScapegoating Quotes
Book:The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond
Create image

“Recovering from family scapegoating requires recognizing that being the ‘identified patient’ is symptomatic of generations of systemic dysfunction within one’s family, fueled by unrecognized anxiety and even trauma. In a certain sense, members of a dysfunctional family are participating in a ‘consensual trance‘, i.e., a ‘survival trance’ supported by false narratives, toxic shame, anxiety, and egoic defense mechanisms, such as denial and projection.”

ScapegoatDysfunctional FamiliesEmpathsTrauma SurvivorsChild Abuse SurvivorFamily ScapegoatScapegoat ChildNarcissistic FamiliesFamily RolesC Ptsd
Book:Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse
Create image

“Children who are scapegoated in families are in reality victims of abuse and neglect – Yet this is rarely recognized by those working in our Mental Health systems, Family Courts, or Educational systems. Because scapegoating processes can be subtle, many scapegoated adult survivors fail to realize that they have suffered from psycho-emotional abuse growing up, and even their therapist or counselor might miss the signs and symptoms associated with being in this most devastating dysfunctional family role.”

Child AbuseScapegoatDysfunctional FamiliesScapegoatingComplex TraumaFamily ScapegoatFamily Scapegoating AbuseNarcissistic Family Abuse
Book:Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse
Create image

“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.”

HateBlameWorld War IScapegoatVersaillesTreaty Of Versailles
Book:Sceptical Essays
Create image

“He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”

HateHatredScapegoatThe OtherEnemy Of The StateThe Indivisible Remainder
Author:Cormac McCarthy
Create image

“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.”

ForceWhiteProgressCivilizationEnlightenmentGuiltMythTriumphLiberalismCollectivesBrutalExpansionOpposingRefinementScapegoat
Book:Black Skin, White Masks
Create image

“I'll tell you something: my dad was a nuclear engineer and he was really bright, and I've always said that because of negotiating at such a young age with my dad, it was really such a gift because I could then negotiate with very difficult personalities - and not end up being the scapegoat. I learned to really pick and choose my battles.”

SaidEndsAgeYoungDifficultPersonalityDadBattlePicksMy DadNuclearEngineersYoung AgeNegotiatingScapegoat
Author:Faith Prince
Create image