Jacques Ellul Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.

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

Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.

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

God is not an encyclopedia whose task it is to satisfy our curiosity.

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

The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

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

The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself.

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

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

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

The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one's neighbor.

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

Fate operates when people give up

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.

The biblical God lets us make our own history, and goes with us on the more or less unheard-of adventures we concoct.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.