J Ellul Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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