The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.
Dwight D. EisenhowerTags: hunting blame scapegoating
As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.
Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.
Tags: prejudice hypocrisy superiority appearances scapegoating labeling
Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.
J.M. CoetzeeTags: punishment scapegoating cleansing godlessness
It's easy to blame traffic jam
when you're late and in a hurry.
Tags: scapegoating
I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.
Christopher HitchensTags: religion sin forgiveness responsibility absolution redemption scapegoating immorality
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 SeranoTags: gender women feminism sexism transgender scapegoating femininity transexual
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 TolstoyTags: criticism blame scapegoating scapegoat
Page 1 of 1.
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.