Rene Girard

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one.

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

A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt.