Girard on the Modern Absolute

"Since the concern for victims becomes widespread only in the modern world, we might think that it would marginalize us in relation to the past, but this is not so. It is the concern for victims that marginalizes the past. We hear repeated in every way that we no longer have an absolute. But the inability of Nietzsche and Hitler to demolish the concern for victims and then later the embarrassed silence of the latter day Nietzscheans show for sure that this concern is not relative. It is our absolute."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 177.