Like Jesus, Satan seeks to have others imitate him but not in the same fashion and not for the same reasons. He wants first of all to seduce. Satan a… - René Girard

The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power; and now the process has turned against it. Believing itself a liberator, it discovers its role as persecutor. Children curse their fathers and become their judges. Contemporary scholars discover traces of magic in all the classical forms of rationalism and science. Instead of breaking through the circle of violence and the sacred as they imagined they were doing, our predecessors re-created weakened variations of myths and rituals.

seria ilusório imaginarmo-nos com dimensão para criticar Shakespeare. Pode acontecer, ao contrário, que seja o inverso. Em vez de tentar julgá-lo de um ponto de vista 'moderno' necessariamente superior, deveríamos tentar encontrar algumas das suas intenções maiores que manifestamente nos escapam. Só podemos tê-las perdido — Deus sabe onde e quando. A menos, bem entendido, que estejam ainda por desvendar

If the patriarchal system, when compared to primitive systems, seems to represent a “lesser” degree of structuralization, then Western civilization since the decline of the patriarchal system can be said to have been governed by a principle of decreasing structuralization or destructuralization during the whole of its historical course — a tendency that can almost be seen as an ultimate aim. A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.