Rene Girard Quotes

Rene Girard

Profession : Historian

Birth : December 25, 1923

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

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

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

Rene Girard

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

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.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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!

Rene Girard

The profound self is a universal self.

Rene Girard

Humanity is the child of religion.

Rene Girard

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

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.

Rene Girard

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.

Rene Girard

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

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.

Rene Girard

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.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard