Selected blame quotes

1. I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.

2. There is, then, no danger in the circumstances that anti-semitism will disappear, for it is the Jews themselves who add fuel to its flames and see that it is kept well stoked. Before the opposition to it can disappear, the malady itself must disappear. And from that point of view, you can rely on the Jews: as long as they survive, anti-semitism will never fade. (13th February 1945)

3. I've been accused of every death except the casualty list of the World War.

4. We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.

5. There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.

6. Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

7. Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

8. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

9. Social Security is not in crisis. It's a crisis the president's created, period.

10. Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself.

11. Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.

12. Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

13. We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

14. It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.

15. If we are going to have a health care program that works for all Americans, we are going to have to get beyond the blame game.

16. The Imam throughout his life called America 'the Great Satan'. He believed that all the Muslims' problems were caused by America.

17. Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

18. Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

19. This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside, not to lay the blame upon anyone outside, but stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find that is always true. Get hold of yourself.

20. If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

21. Those Russians. They did worse things when they entered Pomerania than we ever did in Russia.

22. The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes.

23. Hitler gave us orders - and we believed in him. Then he commits suicide and leaves us to bear the guilt. He should have remained alive to bear his share.

24. To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.

25. Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

26. When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their 'place' - it blames 'outside agitators' and 'Northern interference.' When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

27. The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

28. It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.

29. 'Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.'

30. The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't. When they found this out, they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them.

31. I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

32. No wonder you guys lost.

33. Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy? The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music. . . It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says 'Rise,' it says 'Kill.' Why blame it on me? I didn't write the music.

34. 'I have been asked who caused the riots and the killing in LA, my answer has been direct & simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.'

35. On the eighth day, God created Mankind. Why was he having such a bad day? Why did he create all of you normal and forget so many important parts of me!? He made the teeth that I swallowed... The ear that was ripped from my skull! A face that no longer exists! Deep inside, you are merely a mirror image of all my atrocities! The ugliness that exists outside, lives inside every one of you!

36. You cannot depend upon anybody. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you-your relationship with others and with the world-there is nothing else. When you realize this, it either brings great despair, from which comes cynicism and bitterness, or, in facing the fact that you and nobody else is responsible for the world and for yourself, for what you think, what you feel, how you act, all self-pity goes. Normally we thrive on blaming others, which is a form of self-pity.

37. So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear.

38. Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Fuhrer, we thank you!

39. Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don't kill people, Muslims do.

40. We've been told that our crises are somebody else's fault. We are distracted from our real failures and told to blame the other party, or gay people, or immigrants, and as people have looked away in frustration and disillusionment, we know who has filled the void. The cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests, who've turned government into only a game they can afford to play. They write the checks while you get stuck with the bill. They get access while you get to write a letter.

41. We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change.

42. A lot of people say to me, 'Why did you kill Christ?' I dunno... it was one of those parties that got out of hand, you know?

43. The guilt of many men may be traced to over-affection for their wives.

44. 'Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day on Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holder and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, starting eyes as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'

45. Archie Goodwin, after Carolyn Pratt tells him Lily Rowan will ruin her brother, chapter 3: No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket or at least had been fooling around with timetables.

46. He really lit my fuse when he continued to assert that it was our fault we were attacked on Sept. 11 ... [Ron Paul's comments were] ludicrous and unacceptable.

47. You know, the last two nations that the United States saved before 9/11 were two Muslim nations. So, to my friend Ron Paul: don't blame America first.

48. All the several pleas and excuses, which protect the committer of a forbidden act from the punishment which is otherwise annexed thereto, may be reduced to this single consideration, the want or defect of will. An involuntary act, as it has no claim to merit, so neither can it induce any guilt: the concurrence of the will, when it has its choice either to do or to avoid the fact in question, being the only thing that renders human actions either praiseworthy or culpable. Indeed, to make a complete crime, cognizable by human laws, there must be both a will and an act.

49. 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.