Top 90 Jacques Ellul Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

11. “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

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

— Jacques Ellul

13. “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

14. “A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

16. “Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of a technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world.”

— Jacques Ellul

17. “Fate operates when people give up.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

20. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

21. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

22. “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

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

— Jacques Ellul

24. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

27. “To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces... but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate – and expected – action.”

— Jacques Ellul

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

32. “Human life as a whole is not inundated by technique. It has room for activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered. But the collision between spontaneous activities and technique is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

34. “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

35. “What we are witnessing at the moment is a rearrangement of the world in an intermediate stage; the change is not in the use of a natural force but in the application of technique to all spheres of life.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

38. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

39. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

41. “Efficiency is a fact and justice a slogan.”

— Jacques Ellul

42. “The two things cannot be separated. Truth must incarnate itself in reality; reality is empty without truth. If truth is the unfolding of meaning, this is the meaning of what we see to be real and not of an illusion or dream or phantom. This is how it is with us.”

— Jacques Ellul

43. “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

45. “The tool enables man to conquer. But, man, dost thou not know there is no more victory which is thy victory? The victory of our days belongs to the tool.”

— Jacques Ellul

46. “A major section of modern art and poetry unconsciously guides us in the direction of madness; and, indeed, for the modern man there is no other way. Only madness is inaccessible to the machine.”

— Jacques Ellul

47. “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

48. “It is true that we still talk about “happiness” or “liberty” or “justice,” but people no longer have any idea of the content of the phrases, nor of the conditions they require, and these empty phrases are only used in order to take measures which have no relation to these illusions.”

— Jacques Ellul

49. “Despite the conviction that our era is revolutionary, we must also recognize that under the appearance of movement and development we are in fact living in complete stasis. There is undoubtedly much chaos and violence, there is technical progress, there are social and political experiments. But in reality our world is static, because its structures remain absolutely fixed and its development unfolds along a completely expected rather than revolutionary path.”

— Jacques Ellul

50. “For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.”

— Jacques Ellul