Jacques Ellul Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

  79 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

• 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

  36 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

  51 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

  48 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

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

  Jacques Ellul

  Goal, Belief, Opinion

  43 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

• 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

  21 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

  53 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.

  16 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

• Fate operates when people give up

  Jacques Ellul

  Giving Up, Fate, People

  Jacques Ellul, Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange (1982). “In season, out of season: an introduction to the thought of Jacques Ellul”, Harper San Francisco

  9 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

• 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

  Hate, Pride, Men

  16 Copy quote

• Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

  Jacques Ellul

  Hate, Pride, Levers

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

  7 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

• 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

• 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

  7 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

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Choices, Individuality

  "The Technological Society". Book by Jacques Ellul, translated by John Wilkinson, p. 139, 1964.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  9 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

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Law, Giving, Excellence

  Jacques Ellul (2009). “Money and Power”, p.110, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  9 Copy quote

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