Quotes from Rene Girard

Where the successful or failed dialogues between Christianity and other cultures are concerned, we could go on for hours.

Le leggi del desiderio sono universali ma non comportano l'uniformità delle opere romanzesche, nemmeno sui punti di applicazione. La legge fonda la diversità e la rende intelligibile. L'unità romanzesca appare a condizione che smettiamo di considerare il personaggio - il sacrosanto individuo - come una entità perfettamente autonoma e scopriamo le leggi dei rapporti fra tutti i personaggi.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

Vengeance succeeds in spanning generations and encompassing the world. It transcends time and space. One should not be surprised that in the ancient world vengeance was taken to be sacred.

To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Individualism is a formidable lie.

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

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