Jacques Ellul Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

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

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.

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

(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