Rene Girard Quotes
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.
Rene Girard
French polymath
All of my work has been an effort to show that Christianity is superior and not just another mythology.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
When we judge, we are always in a psychic space which is circular.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away.
Rene Girard
French polymath
Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.
Rene Girard
French polymath
The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.
Rene Girard
French polymath
The profound self is a universal self.
Rene Girard
French polymath
Terrorism is the vanguard of a general revenge against the West's wealth.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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.
Rene Girard
French polymath
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