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When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver.

— René Girard Violence and the Sacred (1977)

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More quotes by René Girard

The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.

The Scandal of Christianity (2007)

Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight.

Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (2008)

The ultimate meaning of desire is death.

There is always an attempt to move away from the Cross, that is, to perpetuate man’s misrecognition of his violence and protect his pride from the revelation. Without the Cross, there is no revelation of the fundamental injustice of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the founder of human culture, with all its repercussions in our relationships with each other.

The Scandal of Christianity (2007)

All René Girard quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: René Girard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.