Rene Girard

“It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.”

“Paradoxically, we have become so ethnocentric in our relativism that we feel it is only okay for others - not us - to think their religion is superior!”

“Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.”

“The profound self is a universal self.”

“In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.”

“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.”

“Terrorism is the vanguard of a general revenge against the West's wealth.”

“Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Individualism is a formidable lie.”

“I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away.”

“Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father... To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.”

“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.”

“A mimetic crisis is when people become undifferentiated. There are no more social classes, there are no more social differences, and so forth.”

“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.”

“I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.”

“When we judge, we are always in a psychic space which is circular.”

“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.”

“I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.”