This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I praise loudly; I blame softly." - Catherine II "Catherine the Great", born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg NULL
"All of our controlling behavior - our anger, blame, pouting, teaching, explaining, caretaking, compliance, and denial - comes from believing that we can control what others think of us and how they treat us, and that how they think of us and treat us defines us." - Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul
"The faults of our neighbors with freedom we blame, but tax not ourselves, though we practice the same." - Alexander Cunningham, 5th Earl of Glencairn
"Everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything... Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for the crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge... But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Blame is one of the surest ways to stay in a problem." - Louise L. Hay
"The secret thoughts of a man run over all things holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verbal discourse cannot do, farther than the judgment shall approve of the time, place and persons." - Thomas Hobbes
"I maintain, in truth, that with a smile we should instruct our youth, be very gentle when we have to blame, and not to put them in fear of virtue's name." - Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL
"We live in a narrow reality, partly conditioned by our form of perception and partly made by opinions that we have borrowed, to which our self-esteem is fastened. We fight for our opinions, not because we believe them but because they involve the ordinary feeling of oneself. Though we are continually being hurt owing to the narrowness of the reality in which we dwell, we blame life, and do not see the necessity of finding absolutely new standpoints. All ideas that have a transforming power change our sense of reality." - Maurice Nicoll
"All weaknesses are just fabrications of mind. If I am not happy with myself, how can you make me happy? It takes time to see that my unhappiness stems from myself and not from you. We love to blame others as the source of our unhappiness because that is how we feel good about ourselves. But when we go deeper, we realize that no one in the whole world can make us happy or unhappy. It depends on our own integrity." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar
"It is rascally to steal a purse, daring to steal a million, and proof of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Praise is especially destructive to children, for they readily grasp the fact that praise is based on identification with their actions. Thus, they automatically blame themselves every time they make a mistake. This is the beginning of their lack of Self-Esteem." - L. S. Barksdale
"Whatever task you undertake, do it with all your heart and soul. Always be courteous, never be discouraged. Beware of him who promises something for nothing. Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures. Do not look for approval except the consciousness of doing your best." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
"People have generally three epochs in their confidence in man. In the first they believe him to be everything that is good, and they are lavish with their friendship and confidence. In the next, they have had experience, which has smitten down their confidence, and they; then have to be careful not to mistrust every one, and to put the worst construction upon everything. Later in life, they learn that the greater number of men have much; more good in them than bad, and that even when there is cause to blame, there is more reason to pity than condemn; and then a spirit of confidence again awakens within them." - Frederika Bremer
"People blame their environment. There is one thing to blame - and only one -- themselves." - Robert Collier
"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for the crime." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"One thing scientists have discovered is that often-appreciated children become more intelligent than often-blamed ones. If some of your employees are a bit dumb, perhaps your treatment of them is to blame. There is a creative element in appreciation." - Thomas Dreier
"If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based." - Betty Friedan
"It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry." - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
"Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"The mind sins, not the body; if there is no intention, there is no blame." - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL
"To live unto eternity is to live unto aeon, unto unity, unto wholeness, completeness, unto the integration of all the life. And this is now. The enemy to now is the illusion of passing-time... When we reach the now the world is turned the other way round. We are at the centre of things. The responsibility is ours. Had we now in our lives we would cease to blame.... Universe evolves out of one’s own mind... because the WORLD is a series of possible mental transformations" - Maurice Nicoll
"Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our powers of judgment are more completely exposed by being overpraised than by being unjustly underestimated." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Why blame the world? The world is free of sin; the blame is yours and mine." - Abul ʿAla Al-Maʿarri NULL
"Every language in the world has something beautiful and something ugly about it, for language is nothing more than the expression of the activities, thoughts, and actions of human beings. There is naturally always something to blame and something to praise." - Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, known also as Fares Chidiac, Faris Al Chidiac
"People in our culture have a morbid tendency to avoid blame, because they do not wish to take the trouble to change their conduct in any way: blame-avoidance and blame-transference are therefore endemic amongst us. These are substitutes for repentance and renewal." - Behavior Research Project NULL
"Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience." - J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
"Sin is an affair of the will. It is not “a vestige of our animal inheritance.” That trivial notion comes from an unexamined, too-quickly swallowed doctrine of evolution. Why blame the brute creation? No self-respecting wolf would be guilty of our modern wars." - George Arthur Buttrick
"We are fully responsible for who it is that we become. In the final analysis, there is no one else to blame. It is totally our own doing. We are always already free to remake our present and future by disencumbering ourselves of unwanted and unhelpful aspects of our past history. Freedom, choice, and responsibility are the ethical watchwords of existentialism." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody else that one passes unnoticed." - John Dewey
"As a solid rock cannot be moved by the wind, the wise are not shaken by praise or blame." - Dhammapada NULL
"Just as solid rocks are not shaken by the wind, so wise men are not moved by either blame or praise." - Dhammapada NULL
"They blame him who talks too much; they blame him who is silent; and they also blame him who speaks little; there is not, in fact, a person who is not blamed. Yet there never was, there will never be, nor is there now, a man who is always blamed or a man who is always praised." - Dhammapada NULL
"The apportioning of blame [is] the means by which society obtains a modicum of revenge for the wrong it has suffered, expiates its own guilt for such responsibility as it may have had for the event in question, and finally seeks to prevent a repetition of the disaster." - Norman F. Dixon
"Failure is an opportunity to learn from your and other’s mistakes. But if you always blame others, there is no end to blaming." - Peter W. Jedlicka
"Praise loudly, blame softly." - Russian Proverbs
"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"As long as you can find someone else to blame for anything you are doing, you cannot be held accountable or responsible for your growth or the lack of it." - Sun Bear, aka Gheezis Mokwa, born Vincent LaDuke NULL
"Scientists have reduced the number of calamities we may blame on God." - John Leonard
"The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins." - Bob Moawad
"Everyone's quick to blame the alien." - Aeschylus NULL