Sacrifice (n.) took the form of a slipper kicked at the wall when I heard my sick relative would live: it smashed a marble Venus — a thank-offering to fate, aimed with mysterious accuracy.
Sacrifice (n.) alone could procure the sacred cement that keeps alive the bond between worshippers and their god.
Sacrifice (n.) became a gift to the god only with the idea of private property; before that it was a sacrament in which the clan killed and ate the totem — the primitive god himself — to renew their likeness to him.
Sacrifice (n.) makes the scene of the father's greatest defeat into the representation of his supreme triumph — offering him satisfaction for the outrage in the same act that commemorates it.
Sacrifice (n.) confesses, once the god himself is the victim, that its object has always been the same — what is now worshipped as God, that is to say, the father.
Sacrifice (n.) is, on this account, the religious sanction of renunciation: the satisfaction each person gave up was offered to the deity, and what was pooled was declared sacred.
Sacrifice (n.) to expiate a crime by a sacrificial death points to one crime only: murder.