Accountability Avoidance Quotes

The devil made me do it.

If I've done anything wrong, I believe it's his fault.

I am not responsible for the actions of Saakashvili and even for those of Gamsakhurdia.

Take care to make things turn out well. Some people scruple more over pointing things in the right direction than over successfully reaching their goals. The disgrace of failure outweighs the diligence they showed. A winner is never asked for explanations.

I don't want to get into the blame game. That's not my job.

I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.

It is less important to find solutions than scapegoats.

Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.

They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.

People are not afraid of failure, they're afraid of blame.

A cardinal rule of bureaucracy is that it is better to extend an error than to admit a mistake.

Victimization status is the modern promised land of absolution from personal responsibility.

[Barack] Obama still is in campaign mode. The Limbaugh Theorem explains it. We've had eight years of Obama and he still isn't being held accountable for the horrible policies that he has implemented because he continues to portray himself as not attached to them.

The swirl of their buzzwords—“access,” “stigma,” “progressive,” “diversity,” “crisis,” etc.—shows a discernible pattern. What these innumerable buzzwords have in common is that they either (1) preempt issues rather than debate them, (2) set the anointed and the benighted on different moral and intellectual planes, or (3) evade the issue of personal responsibility.

Blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility.

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z

Sometimes it's easier to attack the spouse than it is to attack the politician.

The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that he created this brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it.

He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.

Now, some have said I blame too many problems on my predecessor, but let's not forget that's a practice that was initiated by George W. Bush.