Words matter. These are the best Rene Girard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Terrorism is the vanguard of a general revenge against the West’s wealth.
When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely ‘take pity’ on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.
If you scapegoat someone, it’s a third party that will be aware of it. It won’t be you. Because you will believe you are doing the right thing.
On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.
Western civilization is, no doubt, predominantly on the side of secular relativism. That is not true in the Islamic world, where faith dominates.
I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.
In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.
Humanity is the child of religion.
Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.
We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths – but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.
When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
A mimetic crisis is when people become undifferentiated. There are no more social classes, there are no more social differences, and so forth.
The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.
All of my work has been an effort to show that Christianity is superior and not just another mythology.
When we describe human relations, we usually make them better than they are: gentle, peaceful, and so forth, whereas in reality, they are often competitive.
Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.
Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.
The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.
When scandals proliferate, human beings become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another.
We are aware that globalization doesn’t mean global friendship but global competition and, therefore, conflict. That doesn’t mean we will all destroy each other, but it is no happy global village, either.
The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures.
When we judge, we are always in a psychic space which is circular.
Every time I could escape from Sunday church, I did, from the age of twelve until about thirty.
The profound self is a universal self.
The sources of Islamism’s strength include the fact that it is a response to the oppression of the Third World as a whole.
