Jacques Ellul Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Jacques Ellul Quotes
Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

Jacques Ellul
The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.

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

Jacques Ellul
The exousia of political power … is a rebel exousia, an angel in revolt against God.

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Ellul
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.

Jacques Ellul
Christianity, … welcomed at first among the religions of escape, changes into a religion that gives cohesion to society

Jacques Ellul
Everything, right now is the notion that comes from the presence of images, which in effect get us used to seeing all in a single glance.

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.

Jacques Ellul
In one of the temptations Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, that is, the kingdoms and the related political power. …

Jacques Ellul
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Evangelical proclamation was essentially subversive. Put in danger by it, the forces of the social body have replied by integrating this power of negation, of challenge, by absorbing it.

Jacques Ellul
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
The biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the sense that it regards political power as idolatrous.

Jacques Ellul