Best 90 quotes of Jacques Ellul on MyQuotes

Jacques Ellul

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    Jacques Ellul

    According to the International Institute for Environment and Development, the annual amount spent globally on advertising aimed at increasing consumption topped $430 billion in 1998.Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net effect is the massive production of absurd, empty and useless items which are nevertheless utterly serious since we earn our living from them, and dedicate our leisure time to them.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Almost always, it is the conviction that 'I am right' or 'my cause is the cause of justice' that triggers violence. That is, ...the moment propaganda does its work, violence is unleashed. And violence can be reduced by countering this propaganda.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Am I a pessimist? Not at all. I am convinced that the history of the human race, no matter how tragic, will ultimately lead to the Kingdom of God. I am convinced that all the works of humankind will be reintegrated in the work of God, and that each of us, no matter how sinful, will ultimately be saved.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Christians have always tended to transform the Christian Revelation into a Christian religion. Christianity is said to be a religion like any other or, conversely, some Christians try to show that it is a better religion than the others. People attempt to take possession of God. Theology claims to explain everything, including the being of God. People tend to transform Christianity into a religion because the Christian faith obviously places people in an extremely uncomfortable position ­ that of freedom guided only by love and all in the context of God's radical demand that we be holy.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science.... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time

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    Jacques Ellul

    Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society , from politics , from history , for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt , which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    God is always present, always available. At whatever moment in which one turns to him the prayer is received, is heard, is authenticated, for it is God who gives our prayer its value and its character, not our interior dispositions, not our fervor, not our lucidity. The prayer which is pronounced for God and accepted by him becomes, by that very fact, a true prayer.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda - not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    I believe that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century).

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves.

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    Jacques Ellul

    If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.

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    Jacques Ellul

    If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see projected the mirage of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it.

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    Jacques Ellul

    In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics, etc. These, among others - far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine - are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still.

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    Jacques Ellul

    In reality this is the very reverse of what we are told about the biblical God, who opens up freedom for us, who lets us make our own history, who goes with us on the more or less unheard-of adventures that we concoct.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    It is inconceivable that the God who gives Himself in His Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There can only be one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. God wants free people, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned.

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    Jacques Ellul

    It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state's Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth-this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    One thing, however, is sure: unless Christians fulfill their prophetic role, unless they become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or another 'their blood cries to heaven,' and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony.

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    People think that they have no right to judge a fact - all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    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.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.

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    Jacques Ellul

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

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    Jacques Ellul

    Propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

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    Jacques Ellul

    (Propaganda) proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth

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    Jacques Ellul

    Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda texts leads ultimately to less conviction and participation. The listeners critical powers decrease if the propaganda message is more rational and less violent.

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    Jacques Ellul

    Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.