Jacques Ellul Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal - the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing...There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in a sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or radio program there.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory.

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.

The individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. ... Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joys of exploiting his body and winning.

Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.

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.

Totalitarianism extends to whatever touches it...psychological technique, as it operates in the army or in a great industrial plant, entails a direct action on the family. It involves a psychological adaptation of family life to military or industrial methods, supervision of family life, and training family life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. Technique, which is destroying all other civilizations, is more than a simple mechanism: it's a whole civilization in itself.

No technique is possible when men are free. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being.