113 Blame Quotes

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

No wonder you guys lost.

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.

'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.'

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!

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.

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

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!

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

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.

God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is.

He said it was her fault. She said it wasn't at all. But the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary? :-)]

But we can both blame it all on Henry.

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers ...have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply ...they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy.

Parents and legislators love to blame people like us for corrupting the youth of this country, but the kids were corrupted long before we ever got to them.

When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, 'Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.' I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.

He heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.

It's not their fault if, in the heat Of their transactions, I repeat It's not their fault if vampires meet And gurgle in their spats.

Yes, today we have genuine Russian weather. Yesterday we had Swedish weather. I can't understand why your weather is so terrible. Maybe it is because you are immediate neighbours of NATO.

As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical. --Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [213]

Rage at the death of his daughter and all the things that had gone wrong and the people who had screwed up. He needed to kill somebody, to tear them apart, only there wasn't anybody to kill.

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.

Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye.

In part to blame is she, Which hath without consent bin only tride: He comes to neere that comes to be denide.

No wonder I never have any money. We're going to be banned from playing New York, thanks to you fucking assholes.

My back was up against the wall And you slowly just walked away You never really heard my call When I cried out that way With my face against the sun You pointed out for me to go Then you said I was the one Had to reap what you did sow.

In Armenia, the economic condition is miserable not because we have the Artsakh issue, but because, first of all, we have worked poorly. Since '95, our living condition has been heavily difficult.

It was a woman drove me to drink....you know I never did thank her.

I sued Taco Bell 'Cause I ate half a million Chalupas And I got fat! I sued Panasonic They never said I shouldn't use their microwave To dry off my cat!

To say that integration caused the current problems of the black community ignores a whole host of other factors, including the willingness of America to tolerate schools that cripple kids.

'You know they murdered X and tried to blame it on Islam. He turned the power to the have-nots. And then came the shot'

...those hostilities were not very well contained, as we found out on September 11th, and so the notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism I find grotesque.

It was me You were a tool It was me We forgive you

I see that you are a person who refuses to revise his view of the would. You can only bear to live in a world where all the bad things happen to you are someone else's fault, where everyone must have conspired against you to deprive you of your due. Unfortunately, that world happens not to be the real world

You'd think, from the way you talk, that people were responsible for their own behavior And they're not? Haven't you ever seen a 3 year old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him 'look at what you made me do!' that's the moral universe that [they] always lived in

Damn her for forcing him to discover things like this about himself

I don't ever want to see you again. You've made me regret the one unregretable decision of my life - [her]. You've made me wish, somewhere in my heart, that id never married her. Which is like making me wish id never been born

but then America f**ked up and blamed up/I guess it's cause we black that we targets

Cause if it did, you couldn't take it, and don't blame me/I was given this world I didn't make it

Bud, I'm giving you the the big shot here, because Hendrie blew it with all those phoney-baloney voices.

Goddamn bitch set me up!

He is responsible because of the conspiracy and the plots for all that happened to the Jewish people - from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the Aegean Sea, from the Pyrenees to the Urals.

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.

When it rains it pours, they say. My guess is that its those damned English terrorists with their weather machine, trying to ruin our fun.

Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.

'Summer, you're fired! (To Tarek)...and you didn't make it by far,with her own stupidity, she saved your ass!'

One day I had an asthmatic attack. These three asthmatics jumped me. I know, it's my fault... I should have heard them hiding.

You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers... damn anthropologists.

Les querelles ne dureraient pas longtemps, si le tort n'etait que d'un cote.

They used us as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on us. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George - those who want that can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Be here now.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.

It's too easy to blame other people and things in your past for your own self-loathing. (2004)

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.

To think of Russians sitting on a bench in Nuremberg, trying German leaders! The Russians sank a German boat with men, women, and children aboard. I know of the case. But is that investigated? You Americans weren't completely without fault, either. You armed merchant boats before the U.S.A. was in the war.

I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front - it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.

Certainly inside my heart I know degrees of difference. But I can't blame any of these men who share a common fate with me. The big folly of this trial is that it lacks the two men who are to blame for anything which is criminal, namely Hitler and Himmler.

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.

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?

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

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.