Sacrifice (n.) replaces everyone against everyone with all against one: the chaos of many quarrels collapses into a single conflict, the whole community on one side and the victim on the other.
Sacrifice (n.) is simply one more act of violence added to the chain — but it is the last one, violence having the final word.
Sacrifice (n.) is never purely symbolic: the beating many victims receive before they die shows the community truly holds them guilty of the crisis.
Sacrifice (n.) came before domestication, not after; in every case modern man plays down the role of religion.
Sacrifice (n.) was humanity's first way of exploring the world, a kind of research: tried on every species, it happened to domesticate some and dead-ended on others like the bear.
Sacrifice (n.) is mentioned in the Gospels only to be rejected: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice."
Sacrifice (n.) is rightly hated by the modern world, though that hatred is still tinged with sacrificial habits no one has managed to root out.
Sacrifice (n.) means making the sacred, as its very name says: the killing blow lifts the victim above everything else and makes it, in a sense, immortal.
Sacrifice (n.) is what the Passion looks like from the murderers' side; from the victim's side, he dies precisely because he will have nothing to do with sacrifice.
Sacrifice (n.) has always carried an ethic of its own: renouncing the victim without compensation goes beyond mere prohibition.
Sacrifice (n.) was never, as the young Maimonides saw, an eternal institution God wished to found, but a temporary crutch for human weakness.
Sacrifice (n.) has an ideology: without victims the world falls into darkness and chaos, and the dead are presented as volunteers who let themselves be massacred.
Sacrifice (n.) always falls on the one the giver never names: the offer omits the being he most wants to keep, and the demand falls on that one insignificant being.
Sacrifice (n.) is the exorbitant demand answered to an exorbitant offer: it costs the giver a cherished being and his own spiritual integrity.