Jacques Ellul: Trending quotes (page 3)

“The city is not just a collection of ramparts with houses, but also a a spiritual power. … It is capable of directing and changing a man's spiritual life. It brings its power to bear in him and changes his life.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 9

Life , Change , Housing

“Jesus find the same mistake in both the Saducees and the Pharisees, both those who collaborate with the Romans and those who oppose them. In the eyes of Jesus they are both wrong. He will not play any part in the political drama.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 115

Parting

“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.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 384

Law , Sport , Time

“Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. 9
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)

Fashion

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

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. 38
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)

“A person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word. There are two different ways of dealing with an object. They involve not only different approaches, but even more important, opposing mental attitudes. This is not a matter of complementary processes, such as analysis and synthesis or logic and dialectic. These processes lack any qualitative common denominator.”

Jacques Ellul

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 214
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

Way , Thinking , Personality

“The social group which the city represents is so strong that it draws men into sin which is hardly personal to them, but from which they cannot dissociate themselves even if they so desire. Individual virtues are engulfed by the sin of the city.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 67

Men , Strong , Drawing , Personality

“It is frightening to see how easily the church accepts all this. Hardly had it achieved peace before it itself began to persecute. … It commenced the persecution of heretics, and primarily, of course, those who contested the truth and validity of this alliance of empire and church.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 125

Truth , Peace

“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

Source: The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), p. 28

Death , World , Suicide

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

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. xxxii

Freedom , Victory

“The act of canonization itself demonstrates that these are exceptions not meant for ordinary believers. Ordinary believers should follow a path that conforms to what is natural and normal. Hence theology becomes increasingly a theology of nature and moves further apart from a theology of grace. The hard question put by Jesus: “What more are you doing than others?” is obscured. In accord with society as a whole, theology enters into a search for normality, for obedience to the “laws of nature.””

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 33

Law , Search , Question , Nature

“"Righteous Abel," says Matthew [23:34-45]. What luck! So there is a righteous race! No such thing: Abel dies leaving no children, a fact full of meaning. He is unable to transmit his righteousness.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 7

Children

“Cosmao’s … thesis is that societies obey two “sociological laws,” … according to which, when left to their own inertia, they “structure inequality” and “fabricate gods that become their masters.” God’s revelation in Jesus Christ expressly contradicts these two laws and should produce equality and destroy false gods. [Cosmao] contends, however, that Christianity has taken on the role of a “civil religion” and has thus become Christendom.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 134

God , Religion , Law , Christ

“Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him. We are adept at finding reasons—good theological, political, or practical reasons, for camouflaging this. But the real reason is that we let ourselves be impressed and dominated by the forces of the world, by the press, by public opinion, by the political game, by appeals to justice, liberty, peace, the poverty of the third world, and the Christian civilization of the west, all of which play on our inclinations and weaknesses. Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 254

Men , Money , World , Peace

“The first builder of a city was Cain.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 1

“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 book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 19

Life , Reality

“Whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it. … They were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 30

Success

“The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”

Jacques Ellul

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Truth , Justice , Idea

“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.”

Jacques Ellul

L'espérance oubliée (1972) [Hope in Time of Abandonment] translated by C. Edward Hopkin (1973)

World , Faith , History , Falseness

“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 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.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 102

Men , Nature , Perfection