Quotes by Ren Girard

“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 em...”

“The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research -- namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is har...”

“The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be c...”

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be revolutionary now, a...”

“Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.”

“Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect.”

“If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose po...”

“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.”

“In myth, violent death is always justified.”

“My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappea...”

“As every barrier to the constraint of individualism is removed - as 'I' and 'my' appear in the names of more and more software applications and IT products - nevertheless today's rampant mimeticism...”

“We can understand why one of the titles given to Jesus is that of prophet. Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than all of them. He is the prop...”

“The worlds myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.”

“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...”

“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 ...”

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