Sunday, April 28, 2013 – Revisiting Blame
Blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos. ~ Doug Coupland
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame. ~ Bertrand Russell
To err is human. To blame someone else is politics. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. ~ Oscar Wilde
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame. ~ Robert Anton Wilson
It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases. ~ Friedrich Schiller
Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man. ~ Helen Rowland
The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone else he can blame it on. ~ Robert Bloch
The search for someone to blame is always successful. ~ Robert Half
Blame is for God and small children. ~ Dustin Hoffman
I envy people who drink – at least they know what to blame everything on. ~ Oscar Levant
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient. ~ Roland Barthes
All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time? ~ Herman Melville
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. We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that 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, Skeptical Essays
In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman. ~ Lady Nancy Astor
I’m not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher. ~ Stephen Malkmus
We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The “other” is the child’s boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. ~ Helen Tworkov
If you ever have to steal money from your kid, and later on he discovers it’s gone, I think a good thing to do is to blame it on Santa Claus. ~ Jack Handy
A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault. ~ John Henry Newman
A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault. ~ Walter Bagehot
Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch. ~ T. E. Lawrence
Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else. ~ Ivern Ball
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet. ~ Samuel Beckett
Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people. ~ Saki
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame. ~ Umberto Eco
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. ~ Alexander Pope
You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Just Above Sunset 