Ellul Technique Quotes & Sayings

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

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital? — Timothy Leary

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

My desire for him is insane. He's not sentimental - neither of us is - and yet he says things to me that strike at the core of my being and speak to the fighter in me. He makes me crave him in the most vulnerable way. I can't lose him - ever. — Amy A. Bartol

He was the boy that made mix tapes with themes and hand-colored covers until the day he hit my sister and stopped crying. — Stephen Chbosky

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

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

Lydia was like this all the time. I mean, the more I opened up to her, was a model patient or whatever, the icier she got, correcting pretty much everything out of my mouth and at least half of my silent actions as well. But the thing was that her near-constant admonitions actually made me like her more. I think because witnessing her administration of ten zillion rules and codes of conduct, all of which she applied to her own life, made her seem fragile and weak, in need of the constant protection of all those rules, instead of the opposite, the way I know that she wanted to be seen, the way I'd seen her when I first arrived: powerful and all knowing. — Emily M. Danforth

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

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

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

Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account. — Robert Coles

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

So, i revealed secrets i did not want known in order to feel closer to someone. Oh, the loss i felt when i found the secrets i had held dear, that were so difficult to say out loud, that i had kept to myself, were being spread around the next day as if they were nothing! i think that was the moment i realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead. — Kyung-Sook Shin

He kissed her with a new brand of abandon. His touch was smooth and soft and desperate all at once. Her mouth bore down on his as he squeezed her, lifting her on top of him, burying his free hand in her hair. Their limbs overlapped, taut with expectation. Their mouths were hot and tangled. Luce felt dizzy and alive, as if their souls had twined together. It was almost too much to bear. She could never get enough. But she would try. — Lauren Kate

The hill of comfort is the hill of Calvary; the house of consolation is built with the wood of the cross; the temple of heavenly blessing is founded upon the riven rock--riven by the spear which pierced his side. No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like Calvary's tragedy. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

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

[War] can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. — John F. Kennedy

She had a stare that stretched to infinity. — Alice Sebold

TALENT When I was young I had a great talent For bitching and moaning, Lamenting my errors Lost in self-pity's groaning. And now as the leaves on my branches grow dark The life force within me ignited a spark, Can do it, will do it Talent - that's all there is to it! A poem by Karen Lyons Kalmenson — David Mezzapelle

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

I personally killed the girl, Glimmer, and the boy from district 1. As I try to avoid looking at his family, I learn that his name was Marvel. How did I never know that? I suppose that before the games I didn't pay attention, and afterward I didn't want to know. — Suzanne Collins

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

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

It is day two of the Democratic convention, and apparently they had a huge lighting problem in the convention hall today. They worked all day on it. They still couldn't get President Obama out of Bill Clinton's shadow. — Jay Leno

I do a lot of work with mental health and wellness, which I also believe has a lot to do with your lifestyle as well - what you're eating, how you're living, what you're thinking. How you live your life can affect your mental state. — Mariel Hemingway