Rene Girard Quotes

But I don't believe in guilt by association.

I have not killed anyone. They will not let me.

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

There is a tendency to attack some particular group of people and scapegoat them, but this is not the right attitude to cope with epidemics.

I do not intend to be made the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society.

We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people - and to hate those other people.

Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove.

I've done enough wrong on my own, I don't want to get blamed for something I didn't do.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Any country that steps into the same trench as the Jews has only itself to blame.

It is only losers that are prosecuted.

We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?

Criminals are not the victims of society; society is the victim of criminals.

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

The danger that the massacres will surely ruin your state the same as it has destroyed those innocent Jewish victims, rather deepens my regret that you have till now not succeeded in suppressing fully the excesses

That’s like blaming the witch for the witch hunt.

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.

We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

The Nazi’s radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the allies.

Throughout the ages, governments never failed to take advantage of anti-Semitism and the Jewish situation. While the Jews sought tolerance, they were met with intolerance, used as political and religious pawns, caught in the middle, which usually resulted in their becoming victims.