Rene Girard Quotes

#1. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

Rene Girard

#2. But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it.

Rene Girard

#3. Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

Rene Girard

#4. The more one approaches madness, the more one equally approaches the truth, and if one does not fall into the former, one must end up necessarily in the latter.

Rene Girard

#5. Moralists advise us all to avoid violence, of course, but only insofar as this is possible. They authorize us, at least tacitly, to reply to obvious provocations by the measured counterviolence that I described earlier, and which seems to us always justified.

Rene Girard

#6. Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.

Rene Girard

#7. If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Rene Girard

#8. It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.

Rene Girard

#9. It is the Other whom one must love as oneself if one does not desire to idolize and hate the Other in the depths of the underground.

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

#11. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires.

Rene Girard

#12. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he

Rene Girard

#13. The true threat to the world today comes from the mad ambitions of states and capitalists bent on destroying non-modern cultures. It is the so-called developed countries that plunder the planet's resources without showing the least concern for consequences they are incapable of foreseeing.

Rene Girard

#14. In a truly global world, the renunciation of violent reprisal is bound to become, in a more and more obvious way, the indispensable condition of our survival.

Rene Girard

#15. The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.

Rene Girard

#16. The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.

Rene Girard

#17. Only in humans, alone among the animals, did violence make victim mechanisms necessary and bring them into being. If original sin created the problem of violence, it found a solution in archaic religion. The paradox of human cultures is that violence expels violence: Satan casts out Satan. MSB

Rene Girard

#18. Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.

Rene Girard

#19. Silence is the only conduct truly befitting a solipsist, the only one, however, that he cannot bring himself to adopt.

Rene Girard

#20. Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.

Rene Girard

#21. Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely.

Rene Girard

#22. What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.

Rene Girard

#23. That's why he's called Legion - in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.

Rene Girard

#24. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.

Rene Girard

#25. The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

Rene Girard

#26. The underground appeared in this novel as the failure and reversal of Christianity.

Rene Girard

#27. If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor, we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness. If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous.

Rene Girard

#28. Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.

Rene Girard

#29. The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

Rene Girard

#30. 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.

Rene Girard

#31. The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

Rene Girard

#32. Why is it the most difficult to throw? Because it is the only one without a model. When

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#33. We condemn the Inquisition in the name of Christian values. After all, we can't condemn it in the name of the Mahabharata, which is comprised of a series of alternating murders, rather like the Iliad!

Rene Girard

#34. In myth, violent death is always justified.

Rene Girard

#35. War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion.

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#36. Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect.

Rene Girard

#37. He thought against Napoleon, in both senses of the word. See how fruitful resentment can be, and how it can make one

Rene Girard

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

Rene Girard

#39. 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.

Rene Girard