Quotes about accusation (581 quotes, page 2)

“Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men , God , Hate , Truth

“Specific protection must be granted to human rights defenders and whistleblowers who have in some contexts been accused of being unpatriotic, whereas they perform, in reality, a democratic service to their countries and to the enjoyment of human rights of their compatriots.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred de Zayas' Report to the United Nations Human Rights Council http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13704&LangID=E UN expert calls for concrete protection to support civil society voices, including ‘whistleblowers’.
2013

Reality , Country

“The only way you can ever accuse a Conservative of hypocrisy is if they walk past a homeless person without kicking him in the face.”

Jeremy Hardy (1961–2019) British comedian

The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, November 2008

Way , Past , Personality

“I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Interview, Parade magazine (24 November 1991)

Life , Men , Art , History

“Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves—as defenders of “true morality,” whatever that may be—with the morality of those who rule. … The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined immoralism into the position of the politically accused. … But bourgeois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 46

Thinking , Sense

“One of the topics [on the show last week] was the murder of women in the Arab sector, what is referred to, unfortunately, […] as 'honor killing' and has nothing to do with [anything worthy of] honor. The guest in the studio was a woman who had 20 years of experience working for the sake of those same women who die for no good reason, a woman whose everyday job was a holy work for the sake of thousands of Arab women who need a voice that will shout out and cry out their cries. After she had accused the government and the police and everyone of incompetence, I asked her, in a somewhat aggressive manner, as it were, '[…] Where are we in all of this? Where are we Arab women to teach and discipline our sons that a man has no right over a woman? […]' During the commercial break, she got up and told me that I had to learn how to talk to Arabs because the tone that I adopted and the things that I said were said to gain approval from Jews. So I've come to tell you today that I haven't come for approval from you; that I haven't come for approval from anyone; and this is the message that I want you to digest very, very well. In my life I have been accused of many things: that I am the fifth column; that an Arab will always stay an Arab, no matter how liberal he may look; that I bring shame on my family for being in a relationship with a person outside my religion. I've received threats after asking Palestinian residents live on the show why they don't go out against Hamas men, who use them and bring them to their slaughter; I've been attacked on Yom ha-Shoah and Yom ha-Zikaron that the managers at Arutz 2 dared to put an Arab on a show such as that as the host on a day such as that; I've been told that I make Arab women stray off the path of proper behavior; and that I've forgotten where I come from being an 'Ashkenazified', 'Judaized' Arab. So they blamed and they talked—as if that, in itself, made them right.”

Lucy Aharish (1981) Arab-Israeli journalist

Source: Lucy Aharish's campus speech http://www.onlife.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94/%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%99%D7%92%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D-%D7%90%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%A8/85312/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9C%D7%90-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%90-%D7%97%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%A3-%D7%90%D7%97%D7%93 at "מנהיגות היום את המחר". Onlife. 9 November 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2015. Video available.

Life , Women , Men , Family

“As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
Interviews

Understanding

“Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a “critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 58

Feeling , Sense , Summer , Parting

“Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:”

James Joyce book Stephen Hero

It has not epiphanised yet, he said.
Stephen Hero (1944)

Hostility , Smile , Beauty , Mood

“The UN and the mainstream media are wailing and accusing Israel of war crimes (yes, again) after the IDF returned fire at a UN school from which Palestinians were firing mortars. The explosives and booby traps installed in the school by Hamas then blew up, killing dozens of people. And the world blames Israel.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

January 6, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/32368_UN_School_Used_by_Terrorists_As_a_Weapons_Dump&only

War , People , World , School

“It was he who first taught the people the then strange truth that Causation was the law of nature and of mind, and unless we looked for the cause of an evil, we might never know the remedy. Every man of sense in Church and State acts on this truth now, but so few knew it in Owen's day that he was accused of unsettling the morality of the world. It was the fertility and newness of his suggestions, as a man of affairs, that gave him renown, and his influence extends to us. This memorial before us would itself grow old, were we to stay to describe all the ideas the world has accepted from Owen. I will name but one more, and that the greatest.
He saw, as no man before him did, that environment is the maker of men. Aristotle, whose praise is in all our Universities, said "Character is Destiny." But how can character be made? The only national way known in Owen's day was by prayer and precept. Owen said there were material means, largely unused, conducive to human improvement. Browning's prayer was — "Make no more giants, God; but elevate the race at once."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

This was Owen's aim, as far as human means might do it.
Memorial dedication (1902)

Men , God , People , Truth

“Grace and peace from God to you, respected, honoured, wise clement, gracious and beloved Masters: An exceedingly unfortunate affair has happened to me, in that I have been publicly accused before your worships of having reviled you in unseemly words and, be it said with all respect, of having called you heretics, my gracious rulers of the State. I am so far from applying this name to you, that I should as soon think of calling heaven hell. For all my life I have thought and spoken of you in terms of praise and honour, gentlemen of Abtzell, as I do to-day, and, as God favours me, shall do to the end of my days. But it happened not long ago when I was preaching against the Catabaptists that I used these words: 'The Catabaptists are now doing so much mischief to the upright citizens of Abtzell and are showing so great insolence, that nothing could be more infamous. You see, gentle sirs, with what modesty I grieved on your account, because the turbulent Catabaptists caused you so much trouble. Indeed I suspect that the Catabaptists are the very people who have set this sermon against me in circulation among you, for they do many of those things which do not become true Christians. Therefore, gentle and wise sirs, I beg most earnestly that you will have me exculpated before the whole community, and, if occasion arise, that you will have this letter read in public assembly. Sirs, I assure you in the name of God our Saviour, in these perilous times you have never been our of my thoughts and my solicitious anxiety; and if in any way I shall be able to serve you I will spare no pains to do so. In addition to the fact that I never use such terms even against my enemies, let me say that it never entered my mind to apply such insulting epithets to you, pious and wise sirs. Sufficient of this. May God preserve you in safety, and may He put a curb on these unbridled falsehoods which are being scattered everywhere, which is an evidence of some great peril - and may He hold your worships and the whole state in the true faith of Christ@ Take this letter of mine in good part, for I could not suffer that so base a falsehood against me should lie uncontradicted.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter to Abtzell February 12, 1526 (vi., 473), ibid, p.250-251

Life , God , Pain , People

“The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-47, when they informed the British government (a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim League by propagating economic and other secular-sounding arguments for Partition; once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razâkâr militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman” and accused India of having started the war with China. But they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001)

Hostility , War , Support , Time

“I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game

The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.

Nobody wants to have their name, you know, besmirched on the front of newspapers and people say wicked things about them and their family and call them all sorts of names, accuse them of being anti-Semitic and everything else. I mean that’s not part of my design. I don’t enjoy experiencing that. That’s just coming from some place that I have no control over.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

2 August 2006 article http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/08/02/mel-gibson-holocaust-numbers-gamersquo.html

Death , War , People , World

“Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences.”

Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843) French writer

Thalysie: the New Existence. Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 214.

Men , Justice , Animals

“The biggest issue in this election is something called flip-flopping, and all candidates are accused of doing it. A strong leader is expected to maintain steadfast resolve in his opinion even if the environment changes or he gets new information. In any other context, that would be considered the first sign of a brain tumor. When presidents do it, it's called leadership, and frankly, we can't get enough of it.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

DNRC Newsletter #57, 2004-10-28 http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/html/newsletter57.html,

Strong , Change

“Instead of being tried as the accused, they acted like the plaintiff and with increased malice and vileness, they revealed their long-standing enmity towards the Islamic Republic and towards any flag of Islam raised to confront kufr and arrogance.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

2016, Hajj hijacked by oppressors, Muslims should reconsider management of Hajj (September 2015)

“How do you think it is on a Jewish mother? It’s horrible for her to see her son facing these accusations.”

Dov Charney (1969) Canadian-born U.S. based fashion designer/businessman

Ellenson, Ruth (2005). "Unfashionable Crisis" http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=14419 The Jewish Journal (accessed August 8, 2006)

Thinking

“It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484, or during a period of three hundred years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation. The greater number of this incredible multitude were women.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) American abolitionist, writer

Source: Woman, Church and State (1893), p. 247

Death , Women , Personality

“Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U. S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture — "enhanced interrogation techniques" — is a term originally coined enhanced interrogation techniques by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

" 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html#more " The Daily Dish (29 May 2007)

Death , War , Past

“There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation, their families cannot see them and are obviously kept in a strange land outside their own country. There is no international monitoring of their conditions and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals. European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe too.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Paragraphs 6-7
2006, Letter to George W. Bush, 2006

Fate , Secret , Family , Country

“Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Misattributed

Way

“But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes no, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Love , Life , Men , God

“The tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press.

That's how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.
The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they're for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

From a speech http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/569/569p12.htm given at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 16 January 2004
Speeches

Life , Children , World , School

“Am I reading too much into all that innuendo, or did you in fact just connive to assassinate Gregor in one breath, offer to cuckold him in the next, accuse your father of homosexuality, suggest a patricidal plot against him, and league yourself with Cavilo -- what are you going to do for an encore?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

"Depends on the straight lines."
Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

Reading , Dependency

“Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book III, ch. 11
Amelia (1751)

“The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

Source: Nuremberg Diary (1947), p. 4 (1995 edition); also quoted in Nuremberg: A Personal Record of the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals in 1945—46 (1978) by A. Neave, p. 74; original German, as quoted in Der Nürnberger Prozess (1958) by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, p. 103

“During my imprisonment in the Soviet Union, I often heard of an imprisoned Swedish diplomat who had been active in Budapest. The Russian authorities were said to have accused him of espionage for the Germans.”

Wilhelm Mohnke (1911–2001) German general

Quoted in "Raoul Wallenberg: The Mystery Lives on" - Page 198 - by Harvey Rosenfeld - 2005.

“It may be, however, sufficient to say, that wherever the church has had power it has been a crime for any man to speak his honest thought. No church has ever been willing that any opponent should give a transcript of his mind. Every church in power has appealed to brute force, to the sword, for the purpose of sustaining its creed. Not one has had the courage to occupy the open field. The church has not been satisfied with calling Infidels and unbelievers blasphemers. Each church has accused nearly every other church of being a blasphemer. Every pioneer has been branded as a criminal. The Catholics called Martin Luther a blasphemer, and Martin Luther called Copernicus a blasphemer. Pious ignorance always regards intelligence as a kind of blasphemy. Some of the greatest men of the world, some of the best, have been put to death for the crime of blasphemy, that is to say, for the crime of endeavoring to benefit their fellow-men.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Death , Men , World , Intelligence

“To be accused of ignoring my roots is pig ignorant. Collins's racist comment has focused my mind on the fight and I will beat him.”

Chris Eubank (1966) British former professional boxer

Chris Eubank http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1010013,00.html#article_continue

Fight

“We are accused of all sorts of terrible things, of us wanting to undermine your market, of dumping and so forth. There was no such talk before, but when you had your recession, there were people who wanted to put the whole blame on the Russians. All these fables of us being such terrible devils are not well founded. We want to trade in earnest and well.”

Anastas Mikoyan (1895–1978) Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman

Traveling With Mikoyan Quote By Quote (1959)

People

“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues (as too hot to handle) and stoned to death on an accusation of adultery (as too insignificant to cry over), men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death , Women , Men , Cry

“Whether or not our position fairly can be charged as “apolitical” depends entirely upon how one defines “political.” If “political” be taken in the narrow sense, as signifying those means and methods the world regularly accepts as normative for its doing of politics, then the position of me and mine clearly and is that of apoliticism. If, however, “political” be understood in the broad, etymological sense, as identifying whatever actions have public effect upon the life of the “city” (polis), then there are no grounds for accusing either “me” or any of “mine” of advocating apoliticism.”

Vernard Eller (1927–2007) Church of the Brethren pastor and academic, coiner of the term "Christian anarchy"

Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers (1987)

Life , World , Sense , Dependency

“I know only that in my belief in Adolf Hitler I put all my strength at the disposal of my people. As a German soldier I could only put myself at the service of the defense against those destructive forces which had once brought Germany close to the abyss, and which today, after the collapse of the Reich, are still threatening the world. If I have made mistakes in my work through a false conception of obedience, if I carried out orders, all of which, insofar as they are alleged to be cardinal orders, were issued before my time of office, then they are part of a fate which is stronger than myself and which is carrying me along with it. I am accused here because substitutes are needed for the missing Himmler and other elements which were completely contrary to me. Whether my point of view and explanation are accepted or rejected, I ask you not to connect the fate and honor of hundreds of thousands of the living and dead of the General SS, of the Waffen-SS, and of the civil servants who, believing in their ideal, bravely defended, their Reich to the last, with your just curse against Himmler. Like myself, they believed that they were acting according to law.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

8/31/46. Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Page 381 - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947

Fate , People , World , Law

“She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down.”

Woody Allen book Mere Anarchy

Mere Anarchy (2007)

“The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 590

“The Yugoslavs accuse us of allegedly being chauvinists, of interfering in their internal affairs, and of demanding a rectification of the Albanian -Yugoslav borders. A number of our friends think and imply that we Albanian communists swim in such waters. We tell our friends who think thus that they are grossly mistaken. We are not chauvinists, we have neither demanded nor demand rectification of boundaries. But what we demand and will continually demand from the Titoites, and we will expose them to the end for this, is that they give up perpetrating the crime of genocide against the Albanian minority in Kosova and Metohia, that they give up the white terror against the Albanians of Kosova, that they give up driving the Albanians from their native soil and deporting them 'en masse' to Turkey. We demand that the rights of the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia should be recognized according to the Constitution of the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Is this chauvinist or Marxist?”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

People , Thinking , Water

“If I was accused of neglecting my art, or sacrificing my ideas for the sake of stupid ambition, then I would understand the critics; but as that isn't the case, there is nothing to be said. I sent a picture to the Salon for purely commercial reasons. Anyway, it is like some medicines – even if it does no good, it does no harm.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

other impressionist artists then refused to send in their work to the Salon
Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 128 : in a letter to art-dealer Durand-Ruel, March 1881

Stupidity , Art , Idea , Understanding

“A former high school principal accused of being impolite to a mixed-race girl was hired for an administrative job by the school district, over the objections of outsiders demanding ever more minority “rights.””

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Letter From Alabama" by Jeffrey Tucker, Chronicles, May 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Chronicles-1996may-00036,

School , Girl

“As one civil-liberties lawyer, who is concerned about the sometimes vigilante attitude toward accused rapists, puts it: "Some people regard rape as so heinous an offense that they would not even regard innocence as a defense."”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

New Dangers Are Evident in Rape-Case 'Reforms' http://articles.latimes.com/1985-04-08/local/me-18595_1_prior-sexual-activity published 1985-04-08

People

“Sir king, I have been often accused of harbouring traitorous designs against you, but, as God in heaven is just and true, may this morsel of bread choke me if even in thought I have ever been false to you.”

Godwin, Earl of Wessex Anglo-Saxon nobleman; son of Wulfnoth Cild

The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (trans. Thomas Forester), Book VI
Godwin supposedly said this just before he choked to death on a piece of bread at the table of King Edward "the Confessor", but the story is very doubtful.
Misattributed

God , Falseness

“It's really dangerous for a guy to go to college these days. He's better off if he doesn't talk to any women when he gets there. The feminists are perfectly glad to make false accusations and then claim all men are capable of some dastardly deed like rape.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Schlafly: Hatred of Men Gave Rise to UVA Rape Story, Paul Bremmer, WND, 2014-12-10, 2014-12-15 http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/schlafly-hatred-of-men-gave-rise-to-uva-rape-story/,

Women , Men , Guy , Falseness

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l’homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé‚ d’être immoral ! Son miroir montre la fange, et vous accusez le miroir! Accusez bien plutôt le grand chemin où est le bourbier, et plus encore l’inspecteur des routes qui laisse l’eau croupir et le bourbier se former.
Vol. II, ch. XIX
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Water

“The first thing Michael Phelps should have done when that photo came out was call Kobe Bryant's publicist. Cuz Kobe was accused of rape, and all he had to do was settle in court for millions of dollars, change his jersey number and win a championship and that soulless town in LA couldn't be prouder. I just hope that when parents let their kids run around in #24 jerseys, they have the decency to say: 'well come on, number 8 was the rapist. Number 24 has a great work ethic and an unblockable turnaround.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

Hope , Photo , Parent , Change

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Life , Men , Unfaithfulness , Law

“"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so!… I know very well it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that anyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

People , Lie , World , Dreams

“It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Adventures of Sally

The Adventures of Sally (1922)

Cats

“I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Love , Life , Death , God

“Now let's get this straight. You're a pastor of a church supposedly or a bishop. A guy in your church is a big homosexual faggot, and he's a U. S. senator, but you know people might accuse you of meddling if you told him if that's a sin and that he's going to have to leave the church if he doesn't change.”

Texe Marrs (1944–2019) American writer

People , Guy , Change

“Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?”

Joseph Heller (1923–1999) American author

As quoted in "Heller's legacy will be 'Catch-22' ideas" at CNN (13 December 1999) http://archives.cnn.com/1999/books/news/12/13/heller/index.html

Books , Question , Thinking

“O Innocence, the sacred amulet
'Gainst all the poisons of infirmity;
Of all misfortune, injury, and death,
That makes a man in tune still in himself;
Free from the hell to be his own accuser,
Ever in quiet, endless joy enjoying;
No strife nor no sedition in his powers;
No motion in his will against his reason,
No thought 'gainst thought—
But (all parts in him, friendly and secure,
Fruitful of all best things in all worst seasons)
He can with every wish be in their plenty;
When the infectious guilt of one foul crime
Destroys the free content of all our time.”

George Chapman The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron

Act IV, scene i.
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608)

Death , Hell , Time , Joy

“You [Dutch Zero-artist, Henk Peeters] take the North of Europe, I'll take the South. Switzerland will be our neutral zone where we shall have our common exhibition. (Manzoni's reaction when Henk Peeters accused him of plagiary]”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: De Tweede Helft', Ad de Visser, 1998, p. 161

“For years, governments, corporations, and researchers have argued that the testing of animals to assess the risk of chemicals to human health is essential to ensure the well-being of our own species. But now, new breakthroughs in the field of genomics, bioinformatics, epigenetics, and computational toxicology are providing new research tools for studying the impact of toxic chemicals on human health that are far more accurate in assessing the risk of these chemicals to human beings. Antivivisection societies and animal rights organizations have made this argument for many, many years—only to be scorned by scientific bodies, medical associations, and industry lobbies who accuse them of being “anti-progress” in caring more about animals than people. Now it is the scientific establishment, interestingly enough, that has come to the very same conclusions.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

From a video for the Stop Vivisection campaign (10 July 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vep0YbndO14, transcribed in “Jeremy Rifkin: Opinion Piece on Stop Vivisection,” in Equivita.it http://equivita.it/index.php/it/comunicati/2-non-categorizzato/568-jeremy-rifkin-opinion-piece-en

People , Health , Study , Animals

“During the summer of 2012, one Ferguson police officer detained a 32-year-old African American man who had just finished playing basketball at a park. The officer approached while the man was sitting in his car and resting. The car’s windows appeared to be more heavily tinted than Ferguson’s code allowed, so the officer did have legitimate grounds to question him. But, with no apparent justification, the officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile. He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him out of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect that the man was armed. And when the man objected – citing his constitutional rights – the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed it at the man’s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. The arrest caused the man to lose his job.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Cars , Search , Question , Appearance

“The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics… Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950, p. 6 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962;94-95)

Wisdom , People , Books , Faith

“The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

Appearance , Fight , Falseness

“We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

"On Pilgrimage," Catholic Worker (September 1956)

Suffering , Change

“If you’re seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

“I've been accused of being aloof. I'm not. I'm just wary.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward by Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein (1988), p. 314

“Sexual scandals are especially effective against Republicans who can then also be accused of hypocrisy inasmuch as they're always spouting off about morality and junk like that. Of course, some personal issues such as former Klan membership or leaving the scene of a fatal accident are off limits for obvious reasons”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

Pat Sajak, "Searching for the Next GOP Villain," in Human Events, 04/15/05 ( online http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1384786/posts at freerepublic.com)
2000s

Personality

“Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

" The Chorus and Cassandra https://web.archive.org/web/20070220102220/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html" in: Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985: On Noam Chomsky/Cambodia.
1980s

Idea , Effort , Personality

“I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Saturn Over the Water (1961) ch. 2.

Feeling , Help

“Yes, there is some truth to the accusation that I resented being bypassed for Groat in 1960. He had a good season but the records will show I contributed a lot more to winning the pennant. I think, too, that a lot of the writers were moved by their racial feelings. An MVP endorsement looks good in the record of a potential manager, and it'll be a long time before we have a colored manager; longer still before there will be a colored Puerto Rican manager. Anyway, it wasn't my 'imagination' hurting me when I complained, it really was my neck. […] And the doctor says the wrenching of my neck was caused by some unconscious adjustment I had been trying to make because of my back.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "All-Star Case of Roberto Clemente"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Truth , Color , Feeling , Imagination

“What has the church done? It made the wife a slave—the property of the husband, and it placed the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life—to take the veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead—made them believe that they were the brides of Christ. For my part, I would as soon be a widow as the bride of a man who had been dead for eighteen hundred years. The poor deluded girls imagined that they, in some mysterious way, were in spiritual wedlock united with God. All worldly desires were driven from their hearts. They filled their lives with fastings—with prayers—with self-accusings. They forgot fathers and mothers and gave their love to the invisible. They were the victims, the convicts of superstition—prisoners in the penitentiaries of God. Conscientious, good, sincere—insane. These loving women gave their hearts to a phantom, their lives to a dream.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Thanksgiving Sermon (1897)

Love , Life , Death , Women

“One of his charges is that I am accusing the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon of "dual loyalties." That is true, but not in the way Lake imagines. I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U. S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party.”

Juan Cole (1952) American scholar

Neoconservatives

Way , Imagination , Thinking , Loyalty

“I get accused of many things, promoting pedophilia and stuff like that. I find that extraordinary. I dress myself like I would paint a picture. I try to use that to project how I feel inside. I'm a complete romantic as well, but within traditional romantic images you have so much blatant sexism. So it's all those contradiction mixed up. But that's OK. We should embrace all that instead of tearing each other apart for it. That's what I'm admitting to.”

KatieJane Garside (1968) English singer

On her persona and lyrics, The Los Angeles Times (1992)

Feeling , Tear , Painting

“I have been pretty lucky since I left the big leagues. No man who has done the things they accuse me of doing could have been as successful. Everything I touched seemed to turn to money, and I've made my share down through the years. I've been blessed with a good banker, too — my wife. Handing the money to her was just like putting it in the bank. We were married in 1908 when I was just 19 and she was 15, and she has stood by me through everything. We never had any children of our own, but we raised one of my brother's boys from babyhood.”

Joe Jackson (1887–1951) American baseball player

This is the Truth! (1949)

Money , Children , Boy , Success

“Although I cannot accuse myself of being remarkably unstable, I do not pretend that I have never altered my opinion both in respect to men and things. Indeed, I have been very much modified both in feeling and opinion within the last fourteen years. When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This had brought me to other conclusions. When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But the question is not as to what were my opinions fourteen years ago, but what they are now. If I am right now, it really does not matter what I was fourteen years ago. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the Government — not over its ruins. If slaveholders have ruled the American Government for the last fifty years, let the anti-slavery men rule the nation for the next fifty years. If the South has made the Constitution bend to the purposes of slavery, let the North now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice. If 350,000 slaveholders have, by devoting their energies to that single end, been able to make slavery the vital and animating spirit of the American Confederacy for the last 72 years, now let the freemen of the North, who have the power in their own hands, and who can make the American Government just what they think fit, resolve to blot out for ever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, the curse and the disgrace of the whole United States.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Men , Justice , Feeling , Question

“Today 'nationalism' is out of fashion among the opinion-formers. Thanks to a superficial misreading of history, it is accused of having been responsible for two world wars and has widely come to be regarded as a political sin of the first magnitude, fortunately found only in such antiquated and obsolete figures as General de Gaulle. In fact the real danger comes from ideologies not nationalism; for while a nation may properly respect the nationhood of others, an ideology knows no frontiers…Once [the Tories] lose their claim to be, in the fullest sense, the 'national party', they are left, as they are in danger of being left today, either as the party of the 'individual' – a noble but to most people an austere and forbidding creed – or else as the party of the middle classes, which condemns them to a permanent minority.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

'A Tract for the Tories', The Spectator (1967), quoted in The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 8.

War , People , World , History

“Frankly, what Secretary Clinton did in her speech on Thursday was totally ignoring it. She sees an America that, "Morning in America," as she said. It's not morning in America. And if it's midnight in America, like she accused Mr. Clinton of, it's the policies of Obama and Clinton that caused it to be midnight. Mr. Trump has neither position.”

Paul Manafort (1949) American political consultant

Interview on NBC News' Meet The Press (July 31, 2016)

“Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Is Mode Real", p.18,10.

“Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd.”

Tanith Lee book The Storm Lord

Source: The Storm Lord (1976), Chapter 11 (p. 160)

Stupidity

“I do not believe that my brother Tariq accused me of this, and you will not drag me into talking about him or responding [to this claim]. [That said, ] I do have close strategic ties with American organizations involved in protecting human rights, with American ambassadors and with officials in the U. S. State Department. [I also have ties with activists in] most of the E. U. and Arab countries. But they are ties among equals; [I am not] their subordinate.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman – A Profile (2011)

Country

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) When you are invited to dine, particularly with people you do not know very well, it always helps to have a conversational opener, a phrase which here means "an interesting sentence to say out loud in order to get people talking." Although lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca, I keep a list of good and bad conversational openers in my commonplace book in order to avoid awkward pauses at the dinner table. "Who would like to see an assortment of photographs taken while I was on vacation?" for instance, is a very poor conversational opener, because it is likely to make your fellow diners shudder instead of talk, whereas good conversational openers are sentences such as "What would drive a man to commit arson?," "Why do so many stories of true love end in tragedy and despair?," and "Madame diLustro, I believe I've discovered your true identity!," all of which are likely to provoke discussions, arguments, and accusations, thus making the dinner party much more entertaining.”

Daniel Handler book The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto (2004)

Love , People , Books , Help

“The climax was reached when the same Marxist professors started explaining away Islamic iconoclasm in terms of what they described as Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain places of worship. They have never been able to cite more than half-a-dozen cases of doubtful veracity. A few passages in Sanskrit literature coupled with speculations about some archaeological sites have sufficed for floating the story, sold ad nauseam in the popular press, that Hindus destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples on a large scale. Half-a-dozen have become thousands and then hundreds of thousands in the frenzied imagination suffering from a deep-seated anti-Hindu animus…. And these “facts” have been presented with a large dose of suppressio veri suggestio falsi…. A very late Buddhist book from Sri Lanka accuses Pushyamitra Sunga, a second century B. C. king, of offering prizes to those who brought to him heads of Buddhist monks. This single reference has sufficed for presenting Pushyamitra as the harbinger of a “Brahmanical reaction” which “culminated in the age of the Guptas.” The fact that the famous Buddhist stupas and monasteries at Bharhut and Sanchi were built and thrived under the very nose of Pushyamitra is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that the Gupta kings and queens built and endowed many Buddhist monasteries at Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Sarnath among many other places. (…) This placing of Hindu kings on par with Muslim invaders in the context of iconoclasm suffers from serious shortcomings. Firstly, it lacks all sense of proportion when it tries to explain away the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain temples by Islamic invaders in terms of the doubtful destruction of a few Buddhist and Jain shrines by Hindu kings. Secondly, it has yet to produce evidence that Hindus ever had a theology of iconoclasm which made this practice a permanent part of Hinduism. Isolated acts by a few fanatics whom no Hindu historian or pandit has ever admired, cannot explain away a full-fledged theology which inspired Islamic iconoclasm….”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

S.R. Goel, Some Historical Questions (Indian Express, April 16, 1989), quoted in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.

Books , Age , Imagination , Literature

“I am accused of having told thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Auguste Blanqui’s Defence Speech at the ‘Trial of the Fifteen’" (12 January 1832)

People

“The claim that women have a stronger average parental urge than men is sometimes viewed as a sexist generalization. But it’s only sexist if we take a dim view of the trait in question: the parental urge. One could turn the accusation on its head: Those who view the evolutionist’s claim (that women are more parental than men) as sexist are actually being sexist themselves, because they’re taking a negative view of a trait that’s usually found more strongly in females than males. They are therefore prizing prototypically masculine traits more highly than prototypically feminine ones.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 230

Women , Men , Question , Parent

“Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 215.

Reality

“It is fashionable always to cast aspersion upon those that defend persons accused of committing crimes. The viler the accused crime, the more vigorous defense the accused needs, yet, at the same time, the more vitriol the defense attorney will face. I cannot speak for my brethren in the legal community, I can only state that what follows my own brand of patriotism; I defend those charged with crimes because it is both my duty as a lawyer and as an American. Each piece of resistance to the encroachment of overreaching governmental power is, and of itself, a victory for freedom.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in, On the Defense of Criminals, an essay by Jay Leiderman. http://jayleiderman.com/blog/on-the-defense-of-criminals-an-essay-by-jay-leiderman/
Variant: It is fashionable always to cast aspersion upon those that defend persons accused of committing crimes. The viler the accused crime, the more vigorous defense the accused needs, yet, at the same time, the more vitriol the defense attorney will face. I cannot speak for my brethren in the legal community, I can only state that what follows my own brand of patriotism; I defend those charged with crimes because it is both my duty as a lawyer and as an American. Each piece of resistance to the encroachment of overreaching governmental power is, and of itself, a victory for freedom.

Communication , Fashion , Freedom , Time

“Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, “Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation”, in Otero, Ed. (1994), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, pp. 598-615.
1990s

Pain , Hostility , Penalty , Confidence

“By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Death , Pain , Appearance

“Believe not each accusing tongue,
As most weak persons do;
But still believe that story wrong,
Which ought not to be true!”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) Irish-British politician, playwright and writer

Reported in Nicholas Harris Nicolas, The Carcanet: a Literary Album, Containing Select Passages from the Most Distinguished English Writers (1828), p. 132.

Personality

“We can rarely see things from the point of view of another person because we look at the facts through the screen of an impression or an interest which distorts our view; and then there are accusations, quarrels and misunderstanding.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Personality

“Judges are not typically expected to remain dispassionate when they’ve been accused of gang rape, nor should they be.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, The Price of Victory (2018)

“Perhaps the editor may be accused of nationality, when he says, that, taking the total merits of this work together, he prefers it to the early exertions of even the Italian muse, to the melancholy sublimity of Dante, and the amorous quaintness of Petrarca…Here indeed the reader will find few of the graces of fine poetry, little of the attic dress of the muse; but here are life and spirit, and ease and plain sense, and pictures of real manners, and perpetual incident and entertainment. The language is remarkably good for the time, and far superior in neatness and elegance even to that of Gawin Douglass, who wrote more than a century after.”

John Barbour (1316–1395) Scottish poet

John Pinkerton, in his edition of The Bruce (London: G. Nicol, 1790) vol. 1, p. x.
Criticism

Life , Sense , Time

“Maurice Joly: In “Caesar” I bluntly accused our emperor of evil offenses…in ‘’’this’’’ book I expose the nature of the man’s mind, how he thinks, y’see!
Alphonse: But, Maurice, this Napoleon has seduced the public with social gifts…libraries and wars to give them national patriotic pride.
Maurice Joly: BAH! That is the kind of pallitative all dictators give their masses! But at what price? I ask you!
Alphonse: So…you show his plan by the dialogue of Machiavelli who is known as a cunning manipulator of political power, eh?
Maurice Joly: Yes, this is the clearest way to show the similarity of Napoleon’s mind to Machiavelli’s!
Alphonse: Hmmm! A clever device I must admit!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.13

War , Books , Way , Nature

“If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no one can accuse me of greed, or of prurience, or of profligacy, if I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment, my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my father deserves all the credit… As it is now, he deserves from me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to apologize for being a freedman's son.”
Atqui si vitiis mediocribus ac mea paucis mendosa est natura, alioqui recta, velut si egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos, si neque avaritiam neque sordes nec mala lustra obiciet vere quisquam mihi, purus et insons, ut me collaudem, si et vivo carus amicis... at hoc nunc laus illi debetur et a me gratia maior. nil me paeniteat sanum patris huius, eoque non, ut magna dolo factum negat esse suo pars, quod non ingenuos habeat clarosque parentis, sic me defendam.

Horace book Satires

Book I, satire vi, lines 65–92
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)

Life , People , Feeling , Gratitude

“Although it is admitted that certain differences cannot be verified by experiment, we should not infer from this fact that they do not exist. …we are accused of having confused subjective inability with objective indeterminacy.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Interview, November 4th, 2010 http://www.darkoptimism.org/2016/10/14/by-popular-demand-david-flemings-interviews/

Love , Life , Forgiveness , Parting

“Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the idea that Iran's goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is ridiculous. Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: That we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs. Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it's not crazy. It's detestable but it's deterrable. Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world's most dangerous regime won't use the world's most dangerous weapons. And I promise you that as Prime Minister, I will never gamble with the security of Israel. From the beginning, the Ayatollah regime has broken every international rule and flouted every norm. It has seized embassies, targeted diplomats and sent its own children through mine fields. It hangs gays and stones women. It supports Assad's brutal slaughter of the Syrian people. Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terror. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Iran's proxies have dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers, planted thousands of roadside bombs, and fired over twenty thousand missiles at civilians. Through terror from the skies and terror on the ground, Iran is responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. In 1983, Iran's proxy Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 240 American servicemen. In the last decade, its been responsible for murdering and maiming American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just a few months ago, it tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant just a few blocks from here. The assassins didn't care that several Senators and members of Congress would have been murdered in the process. Iran accuses the American government of orchestrating 9/11, and it denies the Holocaust. Iran brazenly calls for Israel's destruction, and they work for its destruction – each day, every day. This is how Iran behaves today, without nuclear weapons. Think of how they will behave tomorrow, with nuclear weapons. Iran will be even more reckless and far more dangerous.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference http://www.aipac.org/pc/videos/2012/monday-gala-plenary/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu (March 2012).
2010s, 2012

Women , Children , People , World

“What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings.”

Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870) German humorist and satirist

Das Menschendasein in seinen weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen (1850); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 287-286.

Love , Life , Death , Men

“As to the viciousness of the philosophers, the meaning of this complaint is succinctly expressed in the charge that the philosophers do not “hold the gods the city holds.” And this accusation is most true. The quest for wisdom begins in doubt of the conventional wisdom about the highest things. The most cherished beliefs of the community, the collective hopes and fears, are centered on its gods. The unpardonable thing is to be beyond these hopes and fears, beyond the awe and shame the gods impose.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 287.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Wisdom , God , Fear , Hope

“John: If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

“I personally have great skepticism about the theories extolling the wonders of "Asian values." They are often based on badly researched generalizations and frequently uttered by governmental spokesmen countering accusations of authoritarianism and violations of human rights (as happened spectacularly at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993).”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

1990s, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests (1996)

World , Personality

“Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus

God , Secret

“By all means, argue against laws that prohibit victimless 'crimes' on the ground that these disproportionally ensnare blacks. But do not err in accusing all cops of targeting blacks, when the former are entrusted with enforcing the law, and the latter violate the law in disproportion to their numbers in the general population.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Ferguson: Angst vor einer militarisierten Polizei” http://jungefreiheit.de/kolumne/2014/ferguson-angst-vor-einer-militarisierten-polizei Junge Freiheit (in German), September 4, 2014.
2010s, 2014

Law

“Retroactively opposing the Holocaust is nicer and easier than getting involved in solving present-day problems. It is nice to accuse the Germans because cosi fan tutti. Armenians are irrelevant, because Armenians don’t own Hollywood and the American media.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2004), published in the blog Scripta Kansanmurhista ja niiden muistamisesta http://www.halla-aho.com/scripta/kansanmurhista_ja_niiden_muistamisesta.html, January 28, 2004
2000-04

Problem

“The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding. It is correct that I had to take over the Reich Security Main Office. There was no guilt in that in itself. Such offices exist in governments of other nations too. However, the task and activity assigned to me in 1943 consisted almost exclusively in the reorganization of the German political and military intelligence service, though not as Heydrich's successor. Almost a year after his death I had to accept this post under orders and as an officer at a time when suspicion fell on Admiral Canaris of having collaborated with the enemy for years. In a short time I ascertained the treason of Canaris and his accomplices to the most frightful extent.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

8/31/46. Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947

Life , Death , Truth , Intelligence

“Glenn Beck: Frog Killer … Glenn Beck Lies About LGF … Beck portrayed this as if I accused him — literally — of killing a frog.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

September 24, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34746_Glenn_Beck_Lies_About_LGF&only

“Nor, though surrounded by such men, did the youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an age when most of those who distinguish themselves in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships at college, he had won for himself a conspicuous place in Parliament. No advantage of fortune or connection was wanting that could set off to the height his splendid talents and his unblemished honour. At twenty-three he had been thought worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who appeared as the delegates of the British Commons, at the bar of the British nobility. All who stood at that bar, save him alone, are gone, culprit, advocates, accusers. To the generation which is now in the vigour of life, he is the sole representative of a great age which has passed away. But those who, within the last ten years, have listened with delight, till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords, to the lofty and animated eloquence of Charles Earl Grey, are able to form some estimate of the powers of a race of men among whom he was not the foremost.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘ Warren Hastings http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/hastings/txt_complete.html’, Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1841), pp. 160–255.
About

Life , Men , Age , Appearance

Quotes about accusation page 2

Quotes about accusation
page 2