Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimization.When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts.

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  Singin'and Swingin'and Getting Merry Like Christmas, ch.9.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that isthefact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

-Du Bois,W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)
Preface to reprint of  The Souls of Black Folk (1969).

Excuse My Dust.

-Parker, Dorothy ne¤  e Rothschild
  Suggested epitaph for herself. Quoted in Alexander Woollcott While Rome Burns (1934),'Our Mrs Parker'. She also suggested 'This is on me' for her tombstone.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him.

-Selden,John
TableTalk (published1689).

I'm one of theundeserving poor†up agen middle-class moralityall the time† What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  Alfred Doolittle. Pygmalion, act 2.