Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jacques Ellul Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jacques Ellul.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1644509

Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society , from politics , from history , for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt , which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 288954

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 212000

It is the multiplication of men who are exluded from working which provokes war. We ought at least to bear this in mind when we boast of the continual decrease in human participation in technical operations. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1520950

No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2038659

All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1241848

Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group...Thus we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly views his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others - a world in which nobody listens to anybody else. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2167191

The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one's neighbor. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1345845

Am I a pessimist? Not at all. I am convinced that the history of the human race, no matter how tragic, will ultimately lead to the Kingdom of God. I am convinced that all the works of humankind will be reintegrated in the work of God, and that each of us, no matter how sinful, will ultimately be saved. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 640439

When God picks out a man and speaks to him, it is to engage him in a work, an action. Nowhere in Scripture do we find indeterminate or purely mystical vocation. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 889350

So I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1105078

If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see projected the mirage of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 170922

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise ... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1701521

The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1076916

According to the International Institute for Environment and Development, the annual amount spent globally on advertising aimed at increasing consumption topped $430 billion in 1998.Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net effect is the massive production of absurd, empty and useless items which are nevertheless utterly serious since we earn our living from them, and dedicate our leisure time to them. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2144628

The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts ... That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success ... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 368886

I hold that in every situation of injustice and oppression, the Christian
who cannot deal with it by violence
must make himself completely a part of it as representative of the victims. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1773526

Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement. The latter (verbalization) can only be the secondary expression of the relationship with God, an overflow from the encounter between the living God and the living person. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 303631

We must be convinced that there are no such things as 'Christian principles.' There is the Person of Christ, who is the principle of everything. But if we wish to be faithful to Him, we cannot dream of reducing Christianity to it certain number of principles (though this is often done), the consequences of which can be logically deduced. This tendency to transform the work of the Living God into a philosophical doctrine is the constant temptation of theologians, and also of the faithful, and their greatest disloyalty when they transform the action of the Spirit which brings forth fruit in themselves into an ethic, a new law, into 'principles' which only have to be 'applied. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 486103

Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 517070

The machine is a tool. But it is not a neutral tool. We are deeply influenced by the machine while using it. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1299747

There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1301130

The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1199196

The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent indivisual intelligence ... The individual, in order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 222382

Salvation is universal because the love of God encompasses all. If God is God and if God is love, nothing is outside the love of God. A place like hell is thus inconceivable. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1917546

God is always present, always available. At whatever moment in which one turns to him the prayer is received, is heard, is authenticated, for it is God who gives our prayer its value and its character, not our interior dispositions, not our fervor, not our lucidity. The prayer which is pronounced for God and accepted by him becomes, by that very fact, a true prayer. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1763462

What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm ... Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1478399

God is not an encyclopedia whose task it is to satisfy our curiosity. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1482634

This is where each individual must decide for himself. The essential thing is the decision to challenge the modern state, which without this small group of protesters will be checked by neither brake, value, nor reason. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1498368

Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1752241

There is one act par excellence which profanes money by going directly against the law of money, an act for which money is not made. That act is giving. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1745012

The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1715587

The intellectual who wants to do her work properly must today go back to the starting point: the woman whom she knows, and first of all to herself. It is at that level, and at no other, that she ought to begin to think about the world situation. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1519738

Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1667230

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1519948

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1643063

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1628317

...modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1987348

The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power . It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism , to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel ), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of " anarchism " (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century). — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2269732

Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years ... In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2214867

The biblical God lets us make our own history, and goes with us on the more or less unheard-of adventures we concoct. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2180030

There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2170003

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve . — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2167931

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions ... The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up ... — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2112805

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2068502

It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth-this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2041476

Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2035292

Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of a technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 2003664

By thinking globally I can analyze all phenomena, but when it comes to acting, it can only be local and on a grassroots level if it is to be honest, realistic, and authentic. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1774466

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1965228

Totalitarianism extends to whatever touches it ... psychological technique, as it operates in the army or in a great industrial plant, entails a direct action on the family. It involves a psychological adaptation of family life to military or industrial methods, supervision of family life, and training family life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. Technique, which is destroying all other civilizations, is more than a simple mechanism: it's a whole civilization in itself. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1943598

No technique is possible when men are free ... Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1933990

No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1925491

Propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1920272

The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1291166

We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the Church and of Christians. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1903320

Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1838696

Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1787787

No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1777965

If man
if each one of us
abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 439669

(Propaganda) proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 734243

And an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 672132

True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances! — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 632880

The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 616089

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 603553

I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history . — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 602427

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abandoned the idea of spiritual or intellectual happiness in order to have this material happiness, consisting of a certain number of essential consumer goods. And hence, in the nineteenth century, happiness was linked to a well-being obtained by mechanical means, industrial means, production. The new thing that Saint-Just spoke about was that, in the past, happiness could appear as a very vague, very distant prospect for humanity, whereas now, people seemed to be within reach of the concrete, material possibility of attaining it. That was why happiness was to become an absolutely essential image for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, and for modern society. Happiness was attainable thanks to industrial development, and this image of happiness brought us fully into the consumer society. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 580589

Propaganda begins when dialogue ends. (Quoted by Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Hot & Cool) — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 507455

People think that they have no right to judge a fact all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat , which are only expressions of the great modern divinity , the Moloch of fact. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 473040

The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal - the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing ... There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in a sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or radio program there. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 469098

Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 750836

For in a civilization which has lost the meaning of life, the most important thing a Christian can do is to live, and life, understood from the point of view of faith, has an extraordinary explosive force. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 368119

What is needed, then, is continuous agitation produced artificially even when nothing in the events of the day justifies or arouses excitement. Therefore, continuing propaganda must slowly create a climate first, and then prevent the individual from noticing a particular propaganda operation in contrast to ordinary daily events. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 348327

Despite the conviction that our era is revolutionary, we must also recognize that under the appearance of movement and development we are in fact living in complete stasis. There is undoubtedly much chaos and violence, there is technical progress, there are social and political experiments. But in reality our world is static, because its structures remain absolutely fixed and its development unfolds along a completely expected rather than revolutionary path. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 301176

For the word is dialectical in itself and at the same time is integrated into the whole of existence. By this I mean that the word is intended to be lived. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 269114

Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 228428

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 204569

The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 151750

To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 136461

In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics , etc. These, among others far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 135374

Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science ... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1215822

Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1413936

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1412096

Christians were never meant to be normal. We've always been holy troublemakers, we've always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that's incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1411512

It is inconceivable that the God who gives Himself in His Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There can only be one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. God wants free people, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1334311

The person who imagined that he could not be the victim of propaganda because he could distinguish truth from falsehood, is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the truth, he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda: moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 130602

It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state's Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1250660

Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1248368

Human life as a whole is not inundated by technique. It has room for activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered. But the collision between spontaneous activities and technique is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1244092

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1228555

Fate operates when people give up — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1449238

We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper pope." The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1181390

For when man is faced with a curse he answers, "I'll take care of my problems." And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1133387

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1128868

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1072034

Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 1063845

What we are witnessing at the moment is a rearrangement of the world in an intermediate stage; the change is not in the use of a natural force but in the application of technique to all spheres of life. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 946173

One thing, however, is sure: unless Christians fulfill their prophetic role, unless they become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or another 'their blood cries to heaven,' and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 837273

Almost always, it is the conviction that 'I am right' or 'my cause is the cause of justice' that triggers violence. That is, ... the moment propaganda does its work, violence is unleashed. And violence can be reduced by countering this propaganda. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 798808

Because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one. — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul Quotes 763500

The individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions ... Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joys of exploiting his body and winning. — Jacques Ellul