Jacques Ellul Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Change, God, Christian

  74 Copy quote

• 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

  Self Confidence, Doe, Telling The Truth

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  Growing Up, Class, Numbers

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Aim Of Life, Forgotten

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Important, Trying, Levers

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Night, Men

  47 Copy quote

• The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief

  Jacques Ellul

  Goal, Belief, Opinion

  42 Copy quote

• 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

  Television, Radio, Influence

  "Jan. 6, 1912: Birth of the Supreme Tech Skeptic", www.wired.com. January 5, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Technology, Order, Civilization

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Games, Play

  28 Copy quote

• Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

  Jacques Ellul

  Men, Doe, Propaganda

  "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes". Book by Jacques Ellul, translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner,, 1965.

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

  Jacques Ellul

  Goal, Ends, Humanist

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Average, Organization

  "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul, translated by John Wilkinson, (p. 274), 1964.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Faith, People, Forever

  Jacques Ellul (2012). “Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World”, p.112, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  51 Copy quote

• When there is propaganda, we are no longer able to evaluate certain questions, or even to discuss them

  Jacques Ellul

  Able, Propaganda, Certain

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jacques Ellul

  Prayer, Moments, Form

  48 Copy quote

• Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity.

  Jacques Ellul

  Victory, Related

  "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul, translated by John Wilkinson, (p. xxxii), 1964.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Ellul

  Tools, Machines

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Prayer, Views

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Blood, Heaven

  40 Copy quote

• The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.

  Jacques Ellul

  Knowing, Library, Facts

  31 Copy quote

• Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.

  Jacques Ellul

  Propaganda, Ends, Dialogue

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Bible, Biblical, Thinking

  40 Copy quote

• Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society.

  Jacques Ellul

  Christian, Agents, Dimensions

  26 Copy quote

• I believe that 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

  Kings, Teaching, Biblical

  "The Subversion of Christianity" by Jacques Ellul, translated by G. Bromiley, (p. 116), 1986.

  32 Copy quote

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