A time comes when it is no longer possible to use this victimhood as an excuse for everything. As every educator knows, it creates a great residue of cynicism, if only because of the obvious gap between what children are taught by rote and what they see with their own eyes. If I am a victim--and not just any victim but an eternal victim-then I am excused from many things: from having pride in what I am, for example; from exploring and studying my real identity; from looking in the mirror; from a sober look at my surroundings to see what is in it and what is not; and from any possibility of empathy for another. Semantic clichés, whose truth no one questions, arise and are parroted, such as "the whole world is against us," when in reality we have both enemies and friends, and the majority of nations and people take no interest in us at all. Or "all the Arabs want to throw us into the sea," with no realistic discernment of our actual, diverse relations with each Arab country separately.

Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.

Few people are attracted to whiners, complainers, excuse-makers, wimps. Hanging out with a victim is not appealing to most reasonably sane people. Who wants to be around or involved with an emotional cripple? The person in the victim shirt tends to wear out his welcome early. As he should. His thinking, his beliefs, and his behavior are even more repellant to money and wealth than they to other people.

Love's an excuse to get hurt and to hurt. Do you like to hurt? I do, I do then hurt me.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery

Losers are wealthy with excuses, moth-eaten, empty wallets, heads full of excuses. This is not an enviable wealth. An abundance of excuses guarantees a paucity of money. If excuses roll willingly from a person’s tongue, it’s certain money does not flow easily into his pockets. I’ve often said I can estimate a person’s bank balance if he’ll tell me about the books he reads and the people he hangs out with. But it’s even easier to accurately estimate his bank balance if I hear the excuses he makes. The habit of excuse making is the worst of all habits.

When you're in love, it's time you need. When the feeling's gone, having an excuse can help.

"Often when you go into a relationship with someone you like, you have to justify why you like that person. You only see what you want to see and you deny there are things you don't like about that person. You lie to yourself just to make yourself right. Then you make assumptions, and one of the assumptions is "My love will change this person." But this is not true. Your love will not change anybody. If others change, it's because they want to change, not because you can change them. Then something happens between the two of you, and you get hurt. Suddenly you see what you didn't want to see before, only now it is amplified by your emotional poison. Now you have to justify your emotional pain and blame them for your choices."

You need to remember that your excuses are seducers, your fears are liars and your doubts are thieves.

People don't want reasons to do what they'd like to. They want excuses.

Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes — once they had gone a certain length — that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love.

Faith was the excuse you used if you didn't have a good argument.

Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.

The fact was that despite himself, without knowing why or how it had happened and very much against his better judgement, he had fallen hopelessly in love. He had fallen as if into some deep and muddy hole. By nature he was a delicate and sensitive soul. He had had ideals and dreamed of an exquisite and passionate affair. And now he had fallen for this little cricket of a creature. She was as stupid as every other woman and not even pretty to make up for it. Skinny and foul-tempered, she had taken possession of him entirely from tip to toe, body and soul. He had fallen under the omnipotent and mysterious spell of the female. He was overwhelmed by this colossal force of unknown origin, the demon in the flesh capable of hurling the most rational man in the world at the feet of a worthless harlot. There was no way he could explain its fatal and total power.