Who am I to blame for all this? ...The guilty one is the crazy person who decided to begin a war when all may not have been done to avoid it.

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

I have been asked who caused the riots and the killing in L. A. My answer has been direct and 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. Yes, I can understand how people were shocked and outraged by the verdict in the Rodney King trial. But there is simply no excuse for the mayhem that followed.

You can't blame me sure the killer was my son
but I didn't teach him to pull the trigger of the gun
It's the killing on this tv screen
you can't blame me it's those images he's seen.
Well you can't blame me says the media man
Well I wasn't the one who came up with the plan
And I just point my camera at what the people want to see
Man it's a two way mirror and you can't blame me.

You have yourself to blame.

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.

A lot of the times the people who make the decision to kill people - if they make that decision, it's because of patriarchy. It's because they're trying to control someone else's sexuality, especially if it's a woman, and they are concerned about, she's going to sleep with someone else - or if they're concerned someone else is going to try to sleep with her. So then that leads to a homicide. Or it's two men who are fighting or going back and forth, and one feels as if their manhood has been disrespected. And so we see the No. 1 reason for certain kind of homicides is a petty argument that escalates.

Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.

The mobbing of harmless, helpless Negroes in the capital of this country is the nation's everlasting shame. The responsibility for starting the riots, which ruled Washington for days, rests upon disorderly lawless whites. Peaceable, unoffending colored men and boys were beaten up and murdered by brutes who boast of our white civilization.

The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

These people don't just come from nowhere, we can't pretend they got beamed down from outer space and then picked up a gun. They came from this country, just like a lot of other things, big problems in the country. A society that aborts its babies; a society that gives its children away to daycare and nannies to raise them, this society which says that we're on a blue marble floating through space without a rhyme or reason. An atheist secular country and we're surprised that we see evil? It's not a surprise at all, and you can't blame it on the guns, and you can't blame it on Whites this time. You can't blame it on mental illness or institutions - some things are bigger than an act of public policy. We wouldn't need public policy if people didn't want to kill children, but they do. Why? You wouldn't need gun control and mental health institutions and all this - press conferences and the hullabaloo - marches for our lives, if you didn't have people that are 18 years old and want to get a gun and shoot up little babies for no reason. Why is our society producing something like that? Something has gone terribly wrong - the chain has been broken - and now were living through the consequences. And you see it. You see it everywhere, everywhere you look, and you don't have to look very far. You start turning over some rocks and you can see the general societal decay, and the anger and the violence and the barbarism. You see it. It's hell's gate; it's open wide open.

They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here.
Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans—but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself.

[on the My Lai massacre and the outcome]: Who's responsible? The human beings who did this. These are war crimes. The individual human beings who put a rifle muzzle up against a baby's head and shot the brains out of that baby, nothing happened to them. Nothing! (quoted in the companion book by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, p. 473)