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René Girard > Quotes

“The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.”

René Girard

.. 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 professes to love but more often despises.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

.. “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.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

 .. “There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion is enough. Those responsible for the Passion are the human participants them-selves, incapable of resisting the violent contagion that affects them all when a mimetic snowballing1 comes within their range, or rather when they come within the range of this snowballing and are swept along by it. We don’t have to invoke the supernatural to explicate this. The war of all against all that transforms communities into a war of all against one that gathers and unifies them is not limited solely to the case of Jesus.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

.. “The anti-Semitic interpretation fails to discern the real intention of the Gospels. It is clearly mimetic contagion that explains the hatred of the masses for exceptional persons, such as Jesus and all the prophets; it is not a matter of ethnic or religious identity. The Gospels suggest that a mimetic process of rejection exists in all communities and not only among the Jews. The prophets are the preferential victims of this process, a little like all exceptional persons, individuals who are different. The reasons for exceptional status are diverse. The victims can be those who limp, the disabled, the poor, the disadvantaged, individuals who are mentally retarded, and also great religious figures who are inspired, like Jesus or the Jewish prophets or now, in our day, great artists or thinkers. All peoples have a tendency to reject, under some pretext or another, the individuals who don’t fit their conception of what is normal and acceptable. If we compare the Passion to the narratives of the violence suffered by the prophets, we confirm that in both cases the episodes of violence are definitely either directly collective in character or of collective inspiration. The resemblance of Jesus to the prophets is perfectly real, and we will soon see that these resemblances are not restricted to the victims of collective violence in the Bible. In myths as well, the victims are or seem different. So”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning