Quotes from Jacques Ellul

La technique se développe de façon indépendante, en dehors de tout contrôle humain.

Spiritual combat is as brutal as men's battle!"74

Propaganda is necessarily false, when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.

Arousing an active and mythical belief" The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

Integration propaganda and the educated Let us note right away a final aspect of Integration Propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is address, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda. In fact, they share the stereotypes of a society even when they are political opponents of the society.

A first order of conclusions will likely appear even more abstract and difficult! It is that Christians must not judge, act, or live according to principles, but according to the reality of the eschaton, lived out here and now. This is exactly the opposite of a moralism.

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.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; be is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness--of himself, of his condition, of his society--for the man who lives by current events.

No technique is possible when men are free.

Thus violence can never be justified or acceptable before God. The Christian can only admit humbly that he could no do otherwise, that he took the easy way and yielded to necessity and the pressures of the world. That is why the Christian, even when he permits himself to use violence in what he considers the best of causes, cannot either feel or say that he is justified; he can only confess that he is a sinner, submit to God's judgment, and hope for God's grace and forgiveness.

Humanism is antiquated and has given way to scientific and technological training because the environment in which the student will be immersed is, first of all, no longer a human, but a technological environment.

The first private clocks appeared in the sixteenth century. Thenceforward, time was an abstract measure separated from the traditional rhythms of life and nature.

Then there is the modern passion for nature. When it is not stockbrokers out after a moose, it is a crowd of brainless conformists camping out on order and as they are told. Nowhere is there any initiative or eccentricity.

Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique's filing cabinet.

That it is to be a dictatorship of test tubes rather than of hobnailed boots will not make it any less a dictatorship.

Il ne peut pas y avoir un développement infini dans un univers fini.

La prévoyance commence lorsque nous acceptons que nous sommes maintenant arrivés à créés une civilisation du risque.

A sacral society is one in which everything, including whatever is not sacred, is judged from the standpoint of the sacred. The profane is not the sacred, but it can exist only in a society which orders everything with reference to the sacred. The fact that man treats a given element as sacred does not mean that the rest is not sacred for the world is a whole. What it means is that the rest is located with reference to the ever present sacred.

A conflict between primary and secondary opinions will arise. One will dominate the other. Propaganda can exist only in societies in which second hand opinion definitely dominates primary opinion and the latter is reduced and driven into a minority position; then, when the individual finds himself between the two conflicting types of opinion, he will normally grasp the general, public opinion.

The poorest population The really poor cannot be subjected to integration propaganda because the immediate concern of daily life absorb all their capacities and efforts. To be sure, the poor can be pushed into rebellion, into to an explosion of violence; they can be subjected to agitation propaganda and excited to the point of theft and murder. But they cannot be trained by propaganda, kept to hand, channeled, or oriented.

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.

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

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