Quotes about blame
page 4

“There is no doubt that Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca have a large share of the responsibility in the Albanian affair, but the real blame must be sought elsewhere. It lies entirely with the Duce's command. This is a command that he, the Duce, cannot hold. Let him leave everything to us, and when things go wrong let him punish those responsible.”

Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956) Italian general during both World Wars and a Prime Minister of Italy

To Pavolini. Quoted in " Albania in the Twentieth Century: A History" - Page 68 - by Owen Pearson - 2006

“With every experience in life, you have two choices: One, you can choose to enjoy and learn from the encounter, even if it is something you don't like. Two, you can struggle through the experience, blaming everyone and everything else around you the entire time. What if you were to view any unfavorable experience in a new way? What if you simply accepted the experience as momentary and learned what you could from it? Think how peaceful that experience would become.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

About Peace

Life, Peace, Way, Thinking

“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

“I suppose that American League pitchers have been feeding me soft ones for 21 years. I know how they all feel, and I don't blame 'em. They'd rather strike out the Babe than anyone else. For I've been a little lucky in the home run racket. They've walked me more than 2000 times and I've never squawked. You see, I used to be a pitcher myself. Those 2000 walks and those 700 or so home runs saved my legs. Anyhow, I've had pretty good legs. They talk about Ty Cobb's legs. He had about the best pair I ever knew of in baseball. But Ty was carrying 180 pounds for 24 years, and I've had to carry from 230 to 250 pounds. I've had to carry 50 to 70 pounds more than Cobb ever had to carry. I never talked to a horse, but I'd like to ask Equipoise or Twenty Grand or Cavalcade or some of the others just how much difference 50 or 70 pounds would make in a race. And I'm not supposed to be a horse or a tank.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Responding to NL pitchers' stated intention—as relayed by Rice—to "bear down on" Ruth in 1935; as quoted in "'Never Happier in My Life' Ruth Tells Grantland Rice..."

Feeling, Home, Time, Horse

“No monetarist, certainly not Friedman, welcomed this side-effect of monetary restraint. But then again, had Friedman been listened to earlier (and had the likes of Paul Samuelson been ignored), things would never have come to this tragic stage. By way of analogy, should we blame those who would end the war in Iraq, and who opposed it all along, for the tragic consequences that are likely to follow any rapid U. S withdrawal?”

George Selgin (1957) economist

In Defense of Monetarism (2008)

War, Way

“Turner will be placed in that class whose genious is such that we can never praise him too much or blame him too much.”

Charles Robert Leslie (1794–1859) British painter (1794-1859)

Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence

“When a woman appears to express fear, we cannot assure her without at least releasing her from responsibility; when we interpret the same emotion in a man as anger, we want to blame him and be certain he acknowledges responsibility. We want to find her guiltless; we want to find him guilty.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 22.

Fear, Appearance, Anger

“Not blaming ourselves for mistakes is the flip side of not taking credit for our acts of courage or creativity or leadership, or our good ideas.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. The Vision and Practice of Interbeing (2013)

Idea, Courage

“Baseball players have to go in front of a grand jury and say, "Yeah, I did cocaine. Can you blame me? It's a slow goddamn game! Come on Jack! Standing out in left field for seven innings, and there's a long white line going down to home plate! I see the guy putting it out going "Heh heh heh heh!!!!" And that damn organ music too, the whole [does intro to "Charge!"]! Third base coach is always doing this…[wiping nose, fidgeting around]. When he's doing that, I don't know whether to slide or do a line! People sliding into home plate head first, umpire goes, "You're out!"”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

"No, baby, I'm up now! Ha ha ha!"
A Night at the Met (1986)

People, Music, Guy, Home

“Why is it that technology is often the one to blame? On the contrary, social media encourages people to “think aloud” and come up with bold, new, controversial, or opposing ideas.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

People, Idea, Thinking

“In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1346.html May 16, 2007

Age, Change

“Being impotent because they have never dared to assert themselves, they continually play the blame game. They are innocent and powerless and, therefore, others are always to blame when things go wrong. … They have yet to bite the apple of consciousness.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 83

Game

““For remember,” he said, “that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”
His voice rang out over the mountain, more impassioned than any of them had ever heard a voice before, and they stood quiet as standing stones, listening.
“For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.””

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 20 “One Goes Alone” (p. 272)

Men, Children, Lie, World

“I blame that cow Mother Teresa”

Tony Martin (comedian) (1964) New Zealand comedian and writer

Hamish and Andy (Radio Show).

“Don't blame me," he said, surprised at her reaction. "Blame human nature. I didn't make the world.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 145

World, Nature

“CLINTON: I have a feeling that by, the end of this evening, I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened.
TRUMP: Why not?
CLINTON: Why not? Yeah, why not?”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Feeling

“On the contrary, it will be a big gift if I am not King. I do not believe my father is happy to be King. He continues to blame me for making him King. I am happy also not to be King. We look too much like each other. He was deposed and I was deposed. History will talk about my father being deposed in 1970 in a coup d'etat. History will talk about Ranariddh as the deposed prime minister.”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

[Julio A Jeldres, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/cambodias-monarchy-search-successor, Cambodia's Monarchy: The search for the successor, 2 April 1999, 8 February 2015, Phnom Penh Post]

Happiness, History

“There is no kind way to rip the skin off animals’ backs. Anyone who wears any fur shares the blame for the torture and gruesome deaths of millions of animals each year. … Saving animals is as simple as choosing synthetic alternatives instead of real fur.”

Natalie Imbruglia (1975) British-Australian singer and actor

"Natalie Imbruglia Speaks Out Against Fur in New PETA Video", PETA.org.uk (9 September 2010) https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/natalie-imbruglia-speaks-fur-new-video/.

Death, Way, Animals

“I have never looked like being in that incredible virtuoso class like, say, Stan Getz. I think people made a mistake and put me in that embryonic class when I was very young and thought that I was going to branch out to be a big instrumentalist in some way or another. But I always find that I very, very seldom get anywhere near what I consider a satisfactory standard. I would much rather be judged for my writing because writing is a thing that you can have second thoughts about and, if it isn’t right, you can’t blame somebody else but yourself.”

John Dankworth (1927–2010) British musician

Times obituary, 8 Feb 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7018290.ece

People, Way, Thinking

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Life, Men, Money, People

“If I have blamed here Christianity, Christian morals, Christian humanity and helpfulness; if I have spoken ironically of all the lighter, minor, and female virtues this teaching has produced and still produces—I have done so in the name of those who have lifted themselves above them, who have outgrown them, who have acquired greater than Christian virtues.”

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Preface, pp. x-xi.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

Help

“Might and spirit will win and incalculable political and social consequences will follow upon victory. Victory must therefore be ours. England is not played out. Her mission is not accomplished. She can, if she would, take the place of esteemed honour among the democracies of the world, and if peace is to come with healing on her wings the democracies of Europe must be her guardians…History, will, in due time, apportion the praise and the blame, but the young men of the country must, for the moment, settle the immediate issue of victory. Let them do it in the spirit of the brave men who have crowned our country with honour in times that have gone. Whoever may be in the wrong, men so inspired will be in the right. The quarrel was not of the people, but the end of it will be the lives and liberties of the people. Should an opportunity arise to enable me to appeal to the pure love of country - which I know is a precious sentiment in all our hearts, keeping it clear of thought which I believe to be alien to real patriotism - I shall gladly take that opportunity. If need be I shall make it for myself. I wish the serious men of the Trade Union, the Brotherhood and similar movements to face their duty. To such it is enough to say 'England has need of you'; to say it in the right way. They will gather to her aid. They will protect her when the war is over, they will see to it that the policies and conditions that make it will go like the mists of a plague and shadows of a pestilence.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to the Mayor of Leicester, declining to speak at a recruitment meeting (September 1914), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 175
1910s

Love, Men, War, People

“No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?”

Rudy Giuliani (1944–2001) American businessperson and politician, former mayor of New York City

In response to the lost explosives in the Al Qa'qaa high explosives controversy, as quoted in NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (29 October 2004) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec04/explosives_10-29.html

“Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love, Angels, Feeling, Soul

“Serious accidents are frequently blamed on "human error." Yet careful analysis of such situations shows that the design or installation of the equipment has contributed significantly to the problems. The design team or installers did not pay sufficient attention to the needs of those who would be using the equipment, so confusion or error was almost unavoidable.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. ix.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)

Error, Problem

“The slight criticism of evolution I offer should not be taken as evidence that I do not believe in evolution; I do. Let's not blame God for everything. I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Sun of Helioscope", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

God, Falseness

“406. He that blames would buy.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“The supposition that the world is ever in league to put a man down is childish. Hardly less childish is it for an author to lay the blame on reviewers. A good sturdy author is a match for a hundred reviewers.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ephemeral and Permanent Success
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

World

“Dr Koenraad Elst, in his two-volume book titled The Saffron Swastika, marshals an incontrovertible array of facts to debunk slanderous attacks on the BJP by a section of the media. About the Rath Yatra, he writes: ‘But what about Advani’s bloody Rath Yatra (car procession) from Somnath to Ayodhya in October 1990? Very simple: it is not at all that the Rath Yatra was a bloody affair. While in the same period, there was a lot of rioting in several parts of the country (particularly Hyderabad, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh), killing about 600 people in total, there were no riots at all along the Rath Yatra trail. Well, there was one: upper-caste students pelted stones at Advani because he had disappointed them by not supporting their agitation against the caste-based reservations which V. P. Singh was promoting. Even then, no one was killed or seriously wounded. It is a measure of the quality of the Indian English-language media that they have managed to turn an entirely peaceful procession, an island of orderliness in a riot-torn country, into a proverbial bloody event (“Advani’s blood yatra”). And it was quite a sight how the pressmen in their editorials blamed Advani for communal riots of which the actual, non-Advanirelated causes were given on a different page of the same paper. Whether Advani with his Rath Yatra was at 500 miles distance from a riot (as with the riot in Gonda in UP), or under arrest, or back home after the high tide of the Ayodhya agitation, every riot in India in the second half of 1990 was blamed on him’.”

L. K. Advani book My Country My Life

L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4, quoting Koenraad Elst, The Saffron Swastika (2001)

People, Books, Peace, Disappointment

“So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3raA1EwrI. 2010s

Love, Happiness, Sense, Suffering

“I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 45

World

“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

“[Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Life, Sex, Thinking, Baby

“Me, guilty me, make me your aim,
O Rutules! mine is all the blame;
He did no wrong, nor e'er could do;
That sky, those stars attest 'tis true;
Love for his friend too freely shown,
This was his crime, and this alone.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IX, p. 324

Love, Star

“Muhammad isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law.”

Charb (1967–2015) French caricaturist and journalist

Deccan Chronicle http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150107/world-europe/article/dont-blame-muslims-not-laughing-our-cartoons-paris-magazine-editor-had (2012)

Law, Drawing

“But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Three

Life, Pain, Hope, Learning

“I have tried my utmost to be judicious in my conclusions, and have neither explained an act or policy to the extent of excusing, nor have I uncritically dispraised or blamed.”

K. S. Lal book History of the Khaljis

Preface
History of the Khaljis (1950)

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

The Corrections (2001)

People, Suffering

“…in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame…”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 135
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

World

“Resist the radical element on campus who advocates "mass action" and violent demonstrations. These are usually the tools of Communist agitators. They get students to demonstrate, and this usually provokes a fight. When the police try to restore order, the Communists slip away in an effort to let the students take the blame. When Communist agitators got the students to wreck the Congressional hearings at San Francisco during May of 1960, the judge decided to release them because he felt the students could already see how they had been duped into fronting for professional anti-Americans.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Effort, Fight

“Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 38

Women, Birth

“Now there's no point in placing the blame
And you should know I'd suffer the same”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Frozen (February 23, 1998) from the album Ray of Light (March 3, 1998), cowritten with Patrick Leonard.

Suffering

“I’m not blaming religion for all or even most human barbarism. Of course faith in God generates compassion and altruism as well. Religious belief probably motivated some rescue workers who tried so heroically to save people from the wreckage. Religious belief offers solace and strength to people in the awful aftermath of the attack. But while they gather together to pray and seek comfort, protection, or approval from God, so do the terrorists. Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.”

Wendy Kaminer (1949) American lawyer

"Our Very Own Taliban" (17 September 2001)

God, People, Faith, Religion

“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

“You will become more conscious if you use the moment of being rebuked or blamed to observe your reaction. You will observe yourself making an excuse, giving a reason.”

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

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“I don't blame the people for the fact that so many movies are bad. I think there's a corrupt, perverted, lazy and sloppy attitude that's pervasive in the movie business. The whole entertainment business is kind of crumbling around us.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

Cinematcal, April 4, 2007.

People, Business, Thinking

“But there is only one person I blame for getting shafted, and that’s myself. I went into the deal which I thought would secure the future of Orange Aids with culpable impetuosity. I had been used to doing business on a handshake and my word of honour, and I made the error of actually believing what the men in the pin-striped suits told me.”

Trevor Baylis (1937–2018) English inventor

Cited in: Gerald Ashley, ‎Terry Lloyd (2010), Two Speed World: The Impact of Explosive and Gradual Change, p. 103

Men, Error, Business, Future

“If the cop honestly felt that this was a young black man (as politically incorrect as it sounds, this is the most violent category of people in the USA) aiming a gun at him, the cop can hardly be blamed for shooting first.”

Piero Scaruffi (1955) Italian writer

Of heroes and thugs: African-American males and white cops http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/usa14.html#usa1214

People

“Like blaming evil, the copycat rationale is so empty that it doesn't even qualify as a convenient explanation… dismissing this rash of murder and sympathy- across the country, across a wide variety of students- as simply copycat shooters assumes that kids operate at about the same intelligence level as sardines.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 178.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Intelligence, Evil, Country

“Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha, Sutta Nipāta
Unclassified

“My friends, after years of hard work and treating people right, isn’t that what we all want to hear? Isn’t that America at our best? We don’t thrive on tearing each other apart, or separating ourselves. We know we are stronger together. We believe in equality and dignity for all. And when we fall short, we strive to do better, not to blame and scapegoat but to improve ourselves, to move toward becoming that more perfect union that our founders hoped for. This election is a chance for us to move still closer to that goal, to make sure everyone can contribute to a growing and prospering America, to say loudly and clearly in this country, no one’s worthless, no one’s ‘less than.’ We’re all of value. In the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, we believe everyone is created equal. And you know what else we believe? We all believe love trumps hate.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Orlando, Florida (September 21, 2016)

Love, Hate, People, World

“Each finding like a friend
Something to blame, and something to commend.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

"Epistle to Mr. Jervas" (1717), lines 21–22.

“By any honest assessment of where we are as a party, without a major course correction, we are simply on the way out. The demographic picture of America is rapidly changing, and we have to change with it. George W. Bush got 56 percent of the white vote, and won. Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote, and lost. Every four years in this country, the electorate gets about two percentage points less white; as an increasingly old and increasingly white party, we are skidding with each passing election toward irrelevance in terms of appealing to a broad electorate. We hold out our hand, expecting our share of nonwhite votes, and yet we give these Americans too few reasons to come our way. Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, and blame them for our country's problems. We all knew of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery. The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 8

Way, Problem, Change, Country

“In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to Fr. Pastells (11 November 1892)

God, Age

“Structure joins the evocative concept of paradigm, a disarmingly simple dialectic of scientific change (long periods of paradigmatic "normal science" punctuated by short "revolutions"), and the apparent authority of historical example to show that major conceptual shifts in the natural sciences are effected not by logical argument alone but also by appeals to worldviews, religion, metaphysical commitments, notions of simplicity and order, and so on. The view that science, like other thought systems, advances or retreats through rhetoric and persuasion, not by logical necessity, was a revelation to people who had never practiced it or studied its history. The book comforted social scientists who wanted to assimilate their discipline to physics, Luddites who blamed social problems on scientists and engineers, and everyone who rejected authority. It repelled the philosophers of science at which it was aimed for the good reason that it undercut their belief that scientific knowledge advances by the application of rational criteria to the products of observation and experiment.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

People, Books, Religion, History

“The great evil, and it was a hard thing to say, was that English officials in India, with many very honourable exceptions, did not regard the lives of the coloured inhabitants with the same feeling of intense sympathy which they would show to those of their own race, colour, and tongue. If that was the case it was not their fault alone. Some blame must be laid upon the society in which they had been brought up, and upon the public opinion in which they had been trained. It became them to remember that from that place, more than from any other in the kingdom, proceeded that influence which formed the public opinion of the age, and more especially that kind of public opinion which governed the action of officials in every part of the Empire. If they would have our officials in distant parts of the Empire, and especially in India, regard the lives of their coloured fellow-subjects with the same sympathy and with the same zealous and quick affection with which they would regard the lives of their fellow-subjects at home, it was the Members of that House who must give the tone and set the example. That sympathy and regard must arise from the zeal and jealousy with which the House watched their conduct and the fate of our Indian fellow-subjects. Until we showed them our thorough earnestness in this matter—until we were careful to correct all abuses and display our own sense that they are as thoroughly our fellow-subjects as those in any other part of the Empire, we could not divest ourselves of all blame if we should find that officials in India did treat with something of coldness and indifference such frightful calamities as that which had so recently happened in that country.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866 1860s

Fate, Age, Jealousy, Feeling

“"So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. […] I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail." [From the file "THOUGHTS" of the qmail distribution]”

Daniel J. Bernstein (1971) American mathematician, cryptologist and programmer

On testing

“Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying
Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern,
Watching the night and its candles gutter,
Snoring at sunrise.
In England now the wind blows high
And clouds brush rudely at the sky;
The blood runs thinly through my frame,
I half-caress the hearthstone’s flame,
Oppressed by autumn’s desolate cry.
Then homesick for the south am I,
For where the lucky swallows fly,
But each warm land is just a name
In England now.
The luckless workers I espy
With chins dipped low and collars high,
Walk into winter, do not blame
The shifting globe. A gust of shame
Represses my unmanly sigh
In England now.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

English Literature: A Survey for Students.
Poetry

Fools, Autumn, Winter, Cry

“Thus our judgments, if they do not borrow from reason and philosophy a fixity and steadiness of purpose in their acts, are easily swayed and influenced by the praise or blame of others, which make us distrust our own opinions.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Timoleon, sec. 6
Parallel Lives

“We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity.”

Shunroku Hata (1879–1962) Japanese general

Quoted in "Enter Japan" - "Time Magazine" article - July 8, 1940

“I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

14 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

War

“Don't simply blame the individuals involved in policy decisions (although they must shoulder the moral and legal responsibilities); blame the sociocultural structure within which they are enmeshed. Search for the role pressures, the premiums and penalties that result from doing or not doing things in certain ways, the goals held out with associated carrots and sticks, and the tensions generated by the often incompatible demands of peers, family, sub- and super-ordinates, politicians, and national flag”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 256.

Family, Penalty, Way, Search

“When you say ambition to me, that's when you get me started! My greatest ambition is to be the whoppingest best actress in Hollywood. You can't blame a girl for trying! I don't want to be classed as a "personality," something to stare at. I want to have my talents respected, not only by the public but by myself.”

Lizabeth Scott (1922–2015) American actress and singer

McFadden, Robert D. (February 6, 2015). " Lizabeth Scott, Film Noir Siren, Dies at 92 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/movies/lizabeth-scott-film-noir-siren-dies-at-92.html". The New York Times.

Girl, Personality

“Farrell’s other eleven defenses are The PMS Defense; The Husband Defense (Warren, I don’t quite know how to summarize this one—not sure I get it); The ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ Defense, aka Learned Helplessness; ‘The Depressed Mother’ Defense; The ‘Mothers Don’t Kill’ Defense; The ‘Children Need Their Mother’ Defense; The ‘Blame-The-Father, Understand-The-Mother’ Defense; The ‘My Child, My Right To Abuse It’ Defense; The Plea Bargain Defense; The Svengali Defense; and The Contract Killing Defense.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, Chapter 12.

Children, Understanding, Learning

“Who can you blame, parents or their friends or the children? In India every parent wants their child to earn more money and fame than any of their peers, no one wants their child to be set on a cultural journey and do tremendous things like other artists or musicians or sportsman have done. They think the entertainment sector won’t earn them any job or money. I blame the parents. They should inspire their children to pursue their interest along with the regular studies. I feel really sorry about this.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Parents and Passion.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

Money, Children, Feeling, Thinking

“Through the principle of associated habit, the same movements of the face and eyes are practised, and can, indeed, hardly be avoided, whenever we know or believe that others are blaming, or too strongly praising, our moral conduct.”

Charles Darwin book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Source: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), chapter XIII: "Self-attention — Shame — Shyness — Modesty: Blushing", page 347 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=375&itemID=F1142&viewtype=image

“At the night of the debate, when I was interrupted, the issue then was said to be that, what I've said, is that some way or another I'm blaming the victims. Which is preposterous. It's sort of like taking somebody who's been murdered or raped, and saying, well, let's find out who it was and what the motives were, which everybody does in crime, it's normal and natural, to say that he's blaming the rape victim, or the murder victim. It couldn't be further from the truth, and an individual like myself and the many many others who have taken this position, that we blame America, or Americans. I'm an American, you're all Americans, and to say that there's a blame placed on you for what that has happened, not these murderers who came in and killed us, is ridiculous. And the whole notion that our foreign policy has nothing to do with it, and Giuliani has never heard this, is unbelievable. It's sort of like saying, a country could be under attack for year after year after year, with sanctions, and hundreds of thousands of people dying, and, oh, they don't care, they haven't even thought about it.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Press conference with Michael Scheuer at the National Press Club, May 24, 2007 http://thenewliberty.com/?p=184 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Truth, Way, Motivation

“The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn't ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, "Here's your square hole"?The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I'm saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

"Pegs and Holes", 2011-06-15, Scott Adams Blog, 2012-12-03 https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/06/15/pegs-and-holes/,, quoted in * 2011-06-20 Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Says Rape Is A ‘Natural Instinct’ For Men Huffington Post https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-on-rape_n_880590

Women, Men, World, Way

“Artists aren't necessarily business people. And they aren't necessarily aware of all the things that go on in their names. Some just want to make some music, but there is a lot of greed among artists as well. Whether or not we know it, we are all to blame. I think it's time — starting with the artist — to try to be a little more responsible and aware of what goes on in our name.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Rolling Stone interview (2002)

People, Music, Business, Thinking

“I cannot but add that I have always been a supporter and defender of your policy when you were Prime Minister. I am sure that it was right. In view of the attitude of France and of the unreadiness of this country for which you were in no way to be blamed, it would have been folly to precipitate then a war with Germany. It was your strength of will and purpose and self-restraint that saved us from that mistake. When the time to meet the challenge of Hitler came, you had made it plain to the whole impartial world that you had done everything possible to keep Europe from war, and to fix the blame for that calamity on the unbridled ambition of Hitler. You enabled your country to enter the war with a clear conscience and a united will.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang to Chamberlain (6 October 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 462-463.
About

War, World, Way, Support

“Another John Doe and we all become the same yeah
Another John Doe and a another face to blame yeah”

Dhani Harrison (1978) English musician

Another John Doe
Lyrics, You Are Here (2008)

“Wasted away again in Margaritaville,
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that there's a woman to blame,
But I know it's nobody's fault.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Margaritaville
Song lyrics, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977)

People

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

Life, Children, Secret, World

“Now reigneth pride in prize
and covetousness is held wise,
and lechery without shame
and gluttony without blame.
Envy reigneth with treason
and sloth is taken in great season.
God do boot, for now is time. Amen.”

John Ball (priest) (1338–1381) English rebel and priest

Letter to the people, quoted in Annals, or a General Chronicle of England by John Stow. "Boot" here means "amends," as in the ancient Anglo-Saxon laws

God, Time, Envy, Season

“I have told the story of a progressive, educated, Hindu family of this country in Lajja. The family falls victim to communal violence, where a rationalist and atheist young man gradually transforms into a staunch Hindu, becomes a fundamentalist and gets destroyed in the process. The state destroys him, the government destroys him and gradually mushrooming religious fanaticism destroys him. He is defeated. Many young men in this country are transforming from human beings to Hindus. They are being repeatedly victimized by the state, in educational institutions, workplaces, business and trade, all because of religious discrimination. They are being labelled second-class citizens. Why should I not speak the truth? The truth will always be valued. The ones who make a truth controversial, the fault lies with them and not with the truth. And the ones who blame the truth support the actions of the miscreants. The Hindus getting into trouble here is a bad excuse. Those who like to stay silent for the sake of convenience are responsible for eroding human strength and courage. They are cowards and exploiters. They are the biggest threats to all minority communities. They believe if you point out a wrong it will lead to trouble. The same argument works for the Muslims there.”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

Nāsarina, T., & Chakraborty, M. (2018). Split: A life.

Men, Truth, Education, Family

“If running a productive, Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Business, Evil, Country

“So all you people here, despite evidence to the contrary, still choose to support a man that for all intents and purposes can't even support himself? OK, OK, so if you're a Jeff Hardy fan, if you're wearing a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, if you're wearing one of his diabolical little handsleeves, God forbid if you have your face painted, I want to see you stand up right now. I want to hear you make some noise! Go ahead, if you love and support Jeff Hardy, let the world know! (Crowd cheers, stands up.) Cameraman, cameraman get a good shot, get a real good shot at all these people. The truth is ladies and gentlemen, I don't blame you. I don't blame anybody here for supporting Jeff Hardy. The people I blame, are their parents. Or let's be realistic here, I said parents, what I should have said was parent. Because it's obviously a single parent situation, just like the way Jeff Hardy grew up. See you people are so concerned with the relationship with your children failing, just like your marriage did, that you acquiesce to their every whim and their every desire. I hate to tell you, this doesn't make you a good parent, Philadelphia, it makes you an enabler. (Crowd boos. Starts chanting for Hardy.) And the fact that you even let your children look up to a guy like Jeff Hardy, just shows that you really don't care what happens to them to begin with. It's a sad situation. So I don't blame anybody here or sitting at home watching this, that supports Jeff Hardy if they're under 17, because they're young and they're, well, they're impressionable. The real problem lies with the parents, it's the parents who don't make a conscious effort to sit their children down and teach them the proper way to live! (Crowd boos.) You see it starts with a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, next thing you know they're smoking a pack of cigarettes, after that, they're drinking a bottle of beer. Right after that they move on to shots of Jack Daniels, which is a gateway drug for marijuana…(Crowd pops for marijuana.) And the fact that you people sit here and cheer that goes to show that I'm telling the truth! How about some old fashioned street drugs? And before you know it they're digging through Mom's purse because they're addicted, they're addicted to prescription medication. (Crowd cheers, Punk mouths,"That's not cool!" to fans.) All of this can be stopped before it's too late! Parents, all you have to do is talk to your children. Sit them down and show them the way, tell them the words that can save their lives, show them that sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you who you are! For weeks, for weeks I've been saying to people like you, just say no. But today I think we should just say yes. Yes to the future of a straight edge, drug free America! Just say yes to the winner of tonight's match, just say yes, to the World Heavyweight Champion! Thank you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

At Night of Champions 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Love, God, Hate, Marriage

“In hell, sinners shall forever lay all the blame on their own wills. Hell is a rational torment by conscience.”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), "The People Who Receive the Saints' Rest"

Hell

“Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 99
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" Growing Old" (1867), st. 7

World

“When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 9

Failure

“Just as the distinction between good and evil is valid only on the empiric plane, so on that plane alone man's will is free to choose, man is responsible for sin. In actual fact, where man is God and personal being a delusion the question of real freedom and responsibility cannot arise. It is this double view of truth —the higher and the lower—that explains the apparent weakness of Hindu doctrine in general (with its incurable inclination to pantheism), and the much-blamed 'inconsistency' of the Gītā, on the subject of freewill.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 47. (25. Freewill)

God, Truth, Question, Freedom

“To blame feminism for women's “lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated — and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Backlash (1992)

Life, Women, People, Effort

“Structural reforms and respecting European treaties are the two pre-requisites to reduce deficits in the long-term and boost the economy’s potential growth rate which, at around 1%, is much lower than the government estimates (close to 4%). It is the French economy’s ‘corsets’ that are to blame for the country’s weak growth (both potential and recorded) which itself generates the deficits and not the austerity policies made necessary by galloping deficits as partisans of the so-called demand- led policy think. The French economy is primarily ill because of its public finances.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014). Structural reforms, The French Economy corsets

Thinking, Country

“Do you remember that terrible moment, señors, when the self-righteousness of your youth died? When all the stern warnings of your elders, ignored until the consequences abruptly came crashing down on your head, made you see in a flash that the warnings hadn’t been unfair or mean-spirited or blind, they’d been right? All along your elders had been trying to tell you about the black joke that is life, trying to help you and save you from pain. But you insisted on running straight into the trap, mocking them as you ran, to the agony that was irreversible and permanent, with no one to blame, finally, but yourself.
It’s not good to see yourself in the mirror then.”

Kage Baker book Mendoza in Hollywood

Part 2 “Babylon is Fallen” Chapter 12 (pp. 259-260)
Mendoza in Hollywood (2000)

Life, Pain, Youth, Help

“It is important for Pollock that Muslims not be blamed for the decline of Sanskrit. He writes that any theory 'can be dismissed at once' if it 'traces the decline of Sanskrit culture to the coming of Muslim power'… Trying to prove the timing of Sanskrit's decline prior to the Turkish invasions enables him to absolve these invasions of any blame… I get the impression that Pollock does not want to dwell on whether Muslim invasions had debilitated the Hindu political and intellectual institutions in the first place… Throughout Pollock's analysis, hardly any Muslim ruler gets blamed for the destruction of Indian culture. He simply avoids discussing the issue of Muslim invasions and their destructive influence on Hindu institutions… The impact of various invasions in Kashmir was so enormous that it cannot be ignored in any historical analysis… The contradiction between his two accounts, published separately, is serious: Muslim invasions created a traumatic enough shockwave to cause Hindu kings to mobilize the 'cult of Rama' and therefore the Hindus funded the production of extensive Ramayana texts for this agenda. And yet, the death of Sanskrit taking place at the same time had little relation to the arrival of Muslims. When Hindus are to be blamed for their alleged hatred towards Muslims, the Muslims are shown to have an important presence; but when Muslims are to be protected from being assigned any responsibility for destruction, they are mysteriously made to disappear from the scene.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Death, Time

“The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane
Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name
Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame
A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Number With No Name.
Song lyrics, White Lies for Dark Times (2009)

“Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform. At the dovish extreme, we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never again fight a war "without committing enough resources to win"; no other flaw is mentioned. And there is President Carter, the noted moral teacher and human rights apostle, who assured us that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual," an observation so uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction. […] Properly statesmanlike, President Bush announces that "It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past." Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but "we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war" if they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs. We might even "begin helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing in action," [New York Times Asia correspondent] Crossette reports. The adjacent front-page story reports Japan's failure, once again, to "unambiguously" accept the blame "for its wartime aggression."”

Noam Chomsky book Year 501

Year 501, 1993 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c10-s07.html. Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

War, Failure, Teachers, Time

“[A]nd between this top-quality programming are the most miserable adverts in the world – former Mancunian top cop John Stalker trying to sell you sun awnings; trying to get you to blot out every ray of light from the world for those in the grip of manic depression – 'Hello, I'm John Stalker. Are you, like me, tired of the pitiless glare of an English summer; maddened by the relentless gaze of cruel Helios; sick of lurking in your house all summer long, like a mad bloke in a siege situation - such as I would have dealt with in my high-flying career? Well, suffer no longer. Install Gloom Master sun awnings - summer bang to rights!' Terrible! Then it all gets worse with those terrible loan adverts. These awful, tragic, hollow-eyed wraiths come on, telling you these awful stories - 'I'm up to my eyes in debt, and, curiously, no reputable company would give me another loan! Then I discovered Dodgy Bastards. They've given me a million pounds, and all they want in return are my kidneys.' No, don't do it! And then - worse than that - the accident insurance adverts - 'Where there's blame, there's a claim”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

when people who've had these accidents come on like medieval beggars, and wave their stumps at you for money with these outlandish stories - 'I slipped on a banana skin and successfully sued the Dominican Republic...' (Wrap up Warm tour, May 2004)
Stand-up

Money, People, World, Light

“Blame the process, not the people.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Deming Seminar, Alexandria, Virginia, 19-22 January 1992 http://ltojconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Deming-quotes.pdf

People

“If you give an opinion in favour of one, you still offend both; for it is a physological quality in quarrels conjugal, that though each considers the other to blame, they will not allow you to think so too; moreover, the chances are, that, in your own private opinion, they are both wrong — a most unpopular verdict to pronounce.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Thinking, Chance

“Industry's high powered lobbying effort is actually about much more than just passing bills. A convenient side effect of this lobbying crusade is to apply corporate spin to maximize effect. The rhetoric surrounding the lobbying shapes the broader debate related to who is to blame for obesity and diet-related health problems. Because lawsuits are such a hot-button issue, industry can take full advantage of the popular scapegoating of trial lawyers, while at the same time invoke all-American values and shove the personal responsibility theory down the nation's collective throat.”

Michele Simon (1965) public health lawyer

Source: Appetite for Profit (2006), pp. 287-288

Health, Problem, Effort, Time

“Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, "intellectuals," as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That was true before the revolution and it is true still.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

Source: The End of Our Time (1919), p. 128

Hate, Evil

“The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.”

David Hume book Of the Standard of Taste

David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, 1760
Variant: The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

Justice, Revenge, Sense, Hurt

“In 1990, the MPAA introduced the NC-17 rating to provide an outlet for legitimate adult fare — non-pornographic motion pictures with content deemed too strong for the under-17 crowd. The first movie released with an NC-17 was Henry & June, whose financial failure was widely blamed on the new rating. After that, all potentially-lucrative films receiving an NC-17 made the cuts required by the MPAA to earn an R. Now, in 1995, there's Showgirls, the most significant test of the NC-17's commercial viability to date. Helmed by Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct) and written by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct), this movie is going into wide release with the adult rating. Too bad it's one of the worst films of the year.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=221 of Showgirls (1995). Half-star reviews

Failure, Strong