Jacques Ellul Quotes
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.
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.
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.
The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
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.
Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society.
Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.
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.
Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.
It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.
Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.
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.
The machine is a tool. But it is not a neutral tool. We are deeply influenced by the machine while using it.
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.
When there is propaganda, we are no longer able to evaluate certain questions, or even to discuss them
Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game.
The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one's neighbor.
There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.
We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the Church and of Christians.
Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity.
Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.
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.
In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.
The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself.
Because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one.
Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact
Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.
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.
Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.
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.
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.
I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.
Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible.
