Scapegoat Quotes & Sayings

High school is the time of puberty. And puberty is a time of intense exposure and vulnerability. Whatever toxic shame a person carries from childhood will be tested in high school. Often teenage groups look for a scapegoat, someone everyone can dump and project their shame onto. This was Arnold's fate. He was viciously shamed by his female peer group. This accounted for his problem with women. — John Bradshaw

This is the way a civilized society begins to devour itself. By allowing our political leaders and law enforcement officials to scapegoat one segment of our population - to turn innocent people into targets of suspicion, into the enemy - we demean all that is good and decent about our nation. — Arsalan Iftikhar

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn't he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? — Richard Dawkins

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice. — Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

IT was a sad if not an altogether broken young man who came to live in London after Wilde's death. He could not yet realize that people, and particularly people in what was still called Society, had an uneasy conscience about their treatment of his friend and would fasten on him as a convenient scapegoat. We did not kill the man's genius, they said in effect, we did not encourage a conspiracy to imprison him by means of a preposterous law, we are not to blame for his barren last years and early death; it was all the fault of this young man who bewitched him into a disastrous attack on his father, who is still free, rich, handsome, as we are not. — Rupert Croft-Cooke

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat. — Ernest Bevin

In times of economic distress, it's only natural for people - and Americans have done this for many years - to look for a scapegoat. Depending on where you live in this country, the scapegoats are either, frankly, Mexicans or Muslims. So, you know, God save you if you happened to be a Mexican Muslim in America right now. — Reza Aslan

Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too. — Finn Mackay

Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats, well here I am. — Marilyn Manson

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge. — Thomas Paine

There's our excuse ... we'll blame everything on the round-headed kid! — Charles M. Schulz

The first domesticated animal was the scapegoat. — Yanko Tsvetkov

A person who smiles in the face of adversity ... probably has a scapegoat. — Stephen Hawking

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this. — Michael Lewis

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.
[closing narration: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", Twilight Zone episode aired March 4, 1960 — Rod Serling

There are times in every person's life when they feel lonely, isolated, like maybe they don't belong. For adoptees, this is often exacerbated by the circumstances. Because you were given up, you have a built-in scapegoat; you can blame everything that you feel on the fact that you were adopted. But, I want you to know that this is a fallacy. Finding your biological parents will not fill in the void that you feel. You will get answers to your questions, but no one can fill in the missing pieces except for you. Before you go on a search, take the time to get to know yourself very well. Heal the hurts you've experienced. Acknowledge the past and how it has affected you. Become a whole person who is seeking roots, not a damaged person who is seeking fulfillment. — Janet Louise Stephenson

Using some economic issues to make one group of people, regardless of race or religion, the scapegoat for all the problems of the country is just the stupidest, and yet, the most creative propaganda scheme that you can come up with. — Immortal Technique

I was a scapegoat. The media had to put responsibility on somebody, and I was chosen. They felt free to say that because someone was thin they were anorexic, which is ridiculous. — Kate Moss

Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat. — Mignon McLaughlin

By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run! — Timothy Ferriss

Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our response - the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us ... Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways. — Dan Millman

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

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

She adapted herself to the split-second rhythm of the New Yorker going to and from work. Getting to the office was a nervous ordeal. If she arrived one minute before nine, she was a free person. If she arrived one minute after, she worried because that made her the logical scapegoat of the boss if he happened to be in a bad mood that day. — Betty Smith

The Church has never been a scapegoat more than it is today. But one must see the symbolic value of this: whatever the Church may have lost by its compromises with the world, its enemies now give back by obliging it to play the same role as Christ. This is its true vocation. And now that it has been reaffirmed, it will enable the Church to shake off the indolence and decadence of the age that is now drawing to a close. MSB — Rene Girard

How quickly we come around,' Sazed whispered. 'It wasn't long ago that men were forced to watch the Lord Ruler cut the heads from innocent people. Now we do it to ourselves. — Brandon Sanderson

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism. — Henry Louis Gates

I do not intend to be made the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society. — Victoria Woodhull

There's no way you can win when you're the president; you've got to be the scapegoat for America's issues. — Wale

For most countries, serving the UN's objectives has never seemed worth even the smallest of risks. Member nations do not want a large, reputable, strong and independent United Nations, no matter their hypocritical pronouncements otherwise. What they want is a weak, beholden, indebted scapegoat of an organization, which they can blame for their failures or steal victories from. — Romeo Dallaire

I love Twitter. It doesn't keep me from writing and I think it's a really convenient scapegoat when the truth is that the real issue is self-control. I am totally fine admitting i have none. I'm not going to blame Twitter for affecting my writing. And also, Twitter doesn't affect my writing. — Roxane Gay

Mimetic theory explains the presence of disabilities and infirmities in a great many mythical stories. When there is no ground for making a victim of someone - because he isn't guilty of anything - people act as children do and make a scapegoat of someone who is physically unattractive, or who is an outsider. The number of outsiders in myths is quite extraordinary. And why are so many victims lame? My work is scientific because it tries to solve the puzzle constituted by these clues, to explain why outsiders, many of them handicapped, are made into victims and forcibly expelled from a community. The burden falls on anyone who doubts my theory to supply a better explanation, or else to adopt mine for want of a more satisfactory one. — Rene Girard

But the christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it, (for that is the plain language of the story,) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better, is making the story still worse; as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery, is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it. — Thomas Paine

Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life. — Alan Bradley

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

Most myths were made up by men who needed a scapegoat to avoid taking responsibility for a catastrophe of their own making. — S.J. Harper

The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic. — Brian Zahnd

Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group - look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known. — Ayn Rand

My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
-Punishment — Seamus Heaney

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. — Frank Herbert

And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results - malign ones, as it was - were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism - you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there. — James Ellroy

The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events. Equally — Hannah Arendt

What would become of the world without the Devil? Under all the different systems of religion that have guided or misguided the world for the last six thousand years, the Devil has been the grand scapegoat. He has had to bear the blame of every thing that has gone wrong. All the evil that gets committed is laid to his door, and he has, besides, the credit of hindering all the good that has never got done at all. If mankind were not thus one and all victims to the Devil, what an irredeemable set of scoundrels they would be obliged to confess themselves! — Geraldine Jewsbury

The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. — Gilles Deleuze

Scapegoat, n.
I think our top two are:
1. Not enough coffee.
2. Too much coffee. — David Levithan

Until someone is prepared to lay out the systemic problem, we will simply go through cycles of finding corruption, finding a scapegoat, eliminating the scapegoat, and relaxing until we find the next scandal. — Newt Gingrich

As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he'd always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before. — Greg Iles

But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism. — Yaron Brook

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. — Mary McCarthy

In America, the only way to succeed politically is to contest your opponent at every pass; to attack every weakness, and most importantly, to make people believe that he or she is a mortal threat to whatever object or value system is in vogue at the moment: the American constitution, Judeo-Christian values, or my favorite catch-all scapegoat: FREEDOM. — Ryan Moehring

It's time to step back and reexamine our hatred and let wrath subside. Are we striking out against the real problems: ignorance, fear, want, greed, and political disenfranchisement or just trying to find the most immediate scapegoat on which to lay the blame? Are we so busy blaming our fellow Hobbits that we've forgotten who is really behind the fouling of our Shire? Are we personally guilty of greed? Most of us are, to an extent. We need to reexamine our own desires, and make sure they are really needs instead of just wants. Poverty could be wiped out world wide, if enough modern Hobbits just said, "No! We will not stand for it anymore," or if those at the top of the economic ladder really wanted to do so. — Steve Bivans

The truth is that, in times of turmoil, people look for a scapegoat to sacrifice. Marie Antoinette just happened to be the French Revolution's favorite It girl. To be fair, Marie Antoinette lived in a world which she was expected to obey her husband as if he were God,, to spill forth children as if she were Eve--- and then accept that aristocrats ate cake while peasants had no bread. After all, it was divine will and all that. — Kris Waldherr

If I still need someone to calm my anger down,
then I surely need a scapegoat who enrages me. — Toba Beta

The ritual of the blood on the lintel of the door, which protected the Israelites from the angel of death, is an apotropaic (avoidance) ritual, such that the family in question would be 'passed over' by the aforementioned denizen of death. Later Jewish and Christian ideas that amalgamated this story with ideas about the scapegoat's providing a substitutionary remedy should not be read into the original tale. The scapegoat symbolized the removal of sin from the nation and perhaps the judging of a substitute. The blood of the Passover lamb on the door symbolized not a sacrifice for sin but rather protection from divine judgment. There is a difference. — Ben Witherington III

Over 50 per cent of all American crime over the last 75 years has been blamed on drugs, because drugs are the single most convenient scapegoat for a society that is unable to blame itself. When it comes to explaining the presence of those drugs themselves, blame is still not placed on American consumers, but on the foreign supplies who grow the stuff. In America, there are no villains - only victims. — Dominic Streatfeild

I see that a number of persons might consider it appropriate to take the ECB as a possible scapegoat and I think that is not the case at all. — Jean-Claude Trichet

It is easy to dump all the problems and responsibilities of a family on a single member. Yet when we look at David's family we can see that the whole family needed to deal with a number of issues. Let's look at a few of them: 1. Each member of the family has hurts. Each member of the family needs help. There is no such thing as a scapegoat. It is easy for a family to designate one of its own. — Henry Cloud

Evil was defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. We scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to so misuse their power, they must have the power to use in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims. The most common relationship of dominion is that of parent over child. Children are weak, defenseless, and trapped in relation to their parents. They are born in thrall to their parents ... They are simply not free or powerful enough to escape. — M. Scott Peck

But if you grow up in a society which is rotten to the core, where you can cheerfully ignore the rules if you have power and status, where your superiors will screw you over if they happen to need a scapegoat . . . you wind up with very little respect for those rules. — Christopher G. Nuttall

When confronted with inner conflicts, we are tempted to obscure them by externalizing the antagonisms - something that is done through the hatred of others and/or the hatred of the self (a method in which the scapegoat mechanism is turned inward). The more difficult, courageous, and ethical path involves attempting to face and tarry with the antagonisms. — Peter Rollins

A leader must take responsibility for all his actions and not blame anyone for his problems. The follower, on the other hand, is always in search of a scapegoat or a miracle worker who can solve his problems. That is why leaders and followers complement each other. A leader is one who is willing to take on responsibility of not only his own failures but also that of his followers. — Awdhesh Singh

Most likely Sinai was innocent and Alpha had used him as a scapegoat to cover his own ass. I needed a minute. It was hurting me to know that I'd killed one of the top members of my team and he was innocent. I'd — Porscha Sterling

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

Stop looking for a scapegoat in your life but be willing to face the truth within yourself & right your own wrongs — Eileen Caddy

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me. — Edward Hoagland

Christ's death represents the loss of Satan's kingdom: the Satanic circle is broken, and the truth and grace of Jesus can now descend on those who are not afraid of accepting it. The Holy Spirit, which is to say the defender of victims, acts first on Peter and the other apostles, telling them that Jesus is innocent and that they are mistaken. Subsequently it acts on other persecutors, showing them that they too are persecutors, making them see the victim's innocence. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor. MSB — Rene Girard

Things you don't need in your life targets you the most. — Michael Bassey Johnson

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

Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any 'abuse' came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position, — Monica Lewinsky

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. — Mark Twain

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine. — Robert Anton Wilson

The courts are an easy scapegoat because at a time when everything has to boiled down to easy slogans, we speak in subtleties. — Rose Bird

Maybe it ain't about others' mistakes,
but only your need for someone to blame. — Toba Beta

It takes courage and intelligence, you know, to do the stages of Yoga right, and to start with this Hatha Yoga ... It's just you and nothing but you, standing in one spot frozen like a statue with no place to go for help or excuse or scapegoat except inward. — Bikram Choudhury

Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing. — George Bernard Shaw

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

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too. — Michael Lewis

Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better. — Lionel Shriver

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being. — James G. Frazer

The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. — Ayn Rand

The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong. — Robert Jackall

But because of this, in many ways obesity is also the ultimate scapegoat - the villain we can easily blame when there's anything wrong going on in the body. And we often blame obesity as the prime suspect even when it's a mere consequence of other problems going on in the body. — Carl J. Lavie

People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves ... I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers. — Linda Ronstadt

Unfortunately, victimization convinces men and women who should be looking for a Savior to search for a scapegoat. After all, if I am not to blame for what I do, the Cross is much ado about nothing. How hopelessly out of date the old spiritual sounds to us. "Not my mother or my father, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Victims do not need God, just a sympathetic therapist or a good lawyer.41 — D. A. Carson

I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man. — Edward Zwick

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. — Ayn Rand

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling. — Francois Mauriac

I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat. — Ice Cube

The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic. — John Bradshaw

Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness. — Virginia Woolf

The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr. — Thomas Szasz

Why ... do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now. — Michael Gove

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't. — Conrad Black

Never lose time in sending the scapegoat to the slaughterhouse. — Ali Sheikh

Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand. — Bob Barr

The battle rages eternal, though the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of those discriminated against changes regularly. Maybe man's need for a scapegoat is genetically programmed into him. — Josh Lanyon

All the themes of incipient fascism are present, to some degree, in our present-day political culture: the fear of the Other, the need for a (powerless) scapegoat, including the theme of expansionism. — Justin Raimondo

Churches that are filled with self-righteous, exclusive, insecure, angry, moralistic people are extremely unattractive. Their public pronouncements are often highly judgmental, while internally such churches experience many bitter conflicts, splits, and divisions. When one of their leaders has a moral lapse, the churches either rationalize it and denounce the leader's critics, or else they scapegoat him. Millions of people raised in or near these kinds of churches reject Christianity at an early age or in college largely because of their experience. For the rest of their lives, then, they are inoculated against Christianity. If you are a person who has been disillusioned by such churches, anytime anyone recommends Christianity to you, you assume they are calling you to adopt "religion." Pharisees and their unattractive lives leave many people confused about the real nature of Christianity. — Timothy Keller

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist. — Richard Dawkins