Top 90 Jacques Ellul Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The intellectual who wants to do her work properly must today go back to the starting point: the woman whom she knows, and first of all to herself. It is at that level, and at no other, that she ought to begin to think about the world situation.”

— Jacques Ellul

52. “The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”

— Jacques Ellul

53. “We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man’s ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

56. “The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one’s neighbor.”

— Jacques Ellul

57. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

58. “So I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos.”

— Jacques Ellul

59. “Faith has to come to birth as a free act, not a forced one. Otherwise it has no meaning.”

— Jacques Ellul

60. “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.”

— Jacques Ellul

61. “In the world everyone wants to be a ‘wolf,’ and no one is called to play the part of ‘sheep.’ Yet the world cannot live without this living witness of sacrifice. That is why it is essential that Christians should be very careful not to be ‘wolves’ in the spiritual sense – that is, people who try to dominate others. Christians must accept the domination of other people, and offer the daily sacrifice of their lives, which is united with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.”

— Jacques Ellul

62. “He judges the present time in virtue of a meta-historical fact, and the incursion of this event into the present is the only force capable of throwing off the dead weight of social and political institutions which are gradually crushing the life out of our present civilization.”

— Jacques Ellul

63. “It is the multiplication of men who are exluded from working which provokes war. We ought at least to bear this in mind when we boast of the continual decrease in human participation in technical operations.”

— Jacques Ellul

64. “Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

66. “The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe.”

— Jacques Ellul

67. “We share in the sin of the world. We are involved in it because in spite of our faith we are and remain sinners; we are also involved in the sin of humanity through the various ‘orders’ of life created by God, so that when a an of my family, or of my nation, commits a sin, I am responsible before God for this transgression. Only this truth must not remain merely a verbal one.”

— Jacques Ellul

68. “What is needed, then, is continuous agitation produced artificially even when nothing in the events of the day justifies or arouses excitement. Therefore, continuing propaganda must slowly create a climate first, and then prevent the individual from noticing a particular propaganda operation in contrast to ordinary daily events.”

— Jacques Ellul

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

— Jacques Ellul

70. “People think that they have no right to judge a ‘fact’ – all they have to do is to accept it.”

— Jacques Ellul

71. “People in their natural condition are incapable on their own of seeing the spiritual reality within which they struggle. They see only what appear to be social, political, or economic problems, and they try to work within this appearance using technical means and moral criteria. In this way they end up in situations that are always more false and complicated, until what they have called their civilization reaches the point of collapse.”

— Jacques Ellul

72. “The proletarian was alienated not only because he was the servant of the bourgeois but because he became a stranger to the human condition, a sort of automaton filled with economic machinery and worked by and economic switch.”

— Jacques Ellul

73. “It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”

— Jacques Ellul

74. “The primary element in any civilization is a stable relation between man and his environment. When man becomes the plaything of abstract decisions, a civilization can no longer be created.”

— Jacques Ellul

75. “The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts... That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.”

— Jacques Ellul

76. “And an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world.”

— Jacques Ellul

77. “Economic life, not in its content but in its direction, will henceforth entirely elude popular control. No democracy is possible in the face of a perfected economic technique. the decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, and technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique.”

— Jacques Ellul

78. “Those who count on the good will of mankind display a delirious, idealistic optimism. Centuries of history, despite the facts, have not been able to convince them of the contrary; reason certainly will not change them. But they are so far removed from reality that their opinion is negligible.”

— Jacques Ellul

79. “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

80. “If a whole people is oriented toward the search for justice or purity, if it obeys in depth the primacy of the spiritual, it does not suffer from the lack of material things, just as we today do not feel the inverse need of the spiritual.”

— Jacques Ellul

81. “In consequence of the claims which God is always making on the world the Christian finds himself, by that very fact, involved in a state of permanent revolution. Even when the institutions, the laws, the reforms which he has advocated have been achieved, even if society be re-organized according to his suggestions, he still has to be in opposition, he still must exact more, for the claim of God is as infinite as His forgiveness.”

— Jacques Ellul

82. “The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement. He can no longer be a smiling skeptical spectator. He is indeed “engaged,” but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions.”

— Jacques Ellul

83. “The human being is changing slowly under the pressure of the economic milieu; he is in process of becoming the uncomplicated being the liberal economist constructed.”

— Jacques Ellul

84. “The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself.”

— Jacques Ellul

85. “The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being.”

— Jacques Ellul

86. “The work of Christian intellectuals is not done in the abstract; it is effective participation in the preservation of the world, and in the building up of the church.”

— Jacques Ellul

87. “Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life’s vexations.”

— Jacques Ellul

88. “The computer is an enigma. Not in its making or its usage, but because man appears incapable of foreseeing anything about the computer’s influence on society and humanity. We have most likely never dealt with such an ambiguous apparatus, an instrument that seems to contain the best and the worst, and, above all, a device whose true potentials we are unable to scrutinize.”

— Jacques Ellul

89. “The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not a for a single man but all.”

— Jacques Ellul

90. “First our desire for money is never satisfied. Our pursuit of money is infinite. We can never say: this is enough... There is never any limit, since in order to set a limit or a stopping point, one would need self-control and wisdom. And if one had these at the outset, he would not have had such a passion for money.”

— Jacques Ellul

91. “Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern.”

— Jacques Ellul

92. “Once again we are faced with a choice of “all or nothing.” If we make use of technique, we must accept the specificity and autonomy of its ends, and the totality of its rules. Our own desires and aspirations can change nothing.”

— Jacques Ellul

93. “Anyone who questions the value of the ‘fact’ draws down on himself the most severe reproaches of our day: he is a ‘reactionary,’ he wants to go back to the ‘good old days,’ and those who make these reproaches do not realize that such questioning is, perhaps, the only revolutionary attitude possible at the present time.”

— Jacques Ellul

94. “Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.”

— Jacques Ellul

95. “The melancholy fact is that the human personality has been almost wholly disassociated and and dissolved through mechanization.”

— Jacques Ellul

96. “The more you add to what you have, the less you are. Accumulating more, concentrating all your effort in the quest for things you can have, means losing your being in the process... Being involves something different than the quest for having. Adding to what you have means losing your being.”

— Jacques Ellul

97. “For when a man is faced with a curse he answers, ‘I’ll take care of my problems alone’. And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse, and one could almost say that such a spirit would never have existed if there had been no curse in the first place.”

— Jacques Ellul