Rene Girard

“The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.”

“A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt.”

“Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one.”

“When the whole world is globalized, you're going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”

“All of my work has been an effort to show that Christianity is superior and not just another mythology.”

“I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.”

“Humanity is the child of religion.”

“The sources of Islamism's strength include the fact that it is a response to the oppression of the Third World as a whole.”

“The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus' innocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims.”

“Every time I could escape from Sunday church, I did, from the age of twelve until about thirty.”

“I do not read many periodicals, and I have little or no contact with progressive Christians, so I don't really know what goes on with them. It seemed to me that very often, the progressive Christianity was an initial step in de-Christianization, but this was probably unfair.”

“What I call a mimetic crisis is a situation of conflict so intense that on both sides people act the same way and talk the same way even though, or because, they are more and more hostile to each other.”

“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.”

“More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.”

“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.”

“The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.”

“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.”

“Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats.”

“Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.”

“Western civilization is, no doubt, predominantly on the side of secular relativism. That is not true in the Islamic world, where faith dominates.”