Jacques Ellul Quotes About Values

Quotes about: Values

• 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

  Spiritual, Fighting, Numbers

• 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

  Spiritual, Downgrading, Violence

• 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

  Taken, Mean, Civilization

  "The Presence of the Kingdom" by Jacques Ellul, translated by Olive Wyon, Seabury paperback, (p. 33), 1967.

• 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

  Decision, Challenges, Groups

  "The Ethics of Freedom". Book by Jacques Ellul, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, p. 397, 1976.

• 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

  Prayer, Character, Giving

• 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

  Responsibility, Men, Civilization

• 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

• 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

  Secret, Analysis, Facts

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