Rene Girard Quotes

Rene Girard

Profession : Historian

Birth : December 25, 1923

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

Rene Girard

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

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.

Rene Girard

Individualism is a formidable lie.

Rene Girard

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.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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.

Rene Girard

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

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

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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