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Jacques Ellul Quotes
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Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics. The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

Considered by many a philosopher, Ellul was by training a sociologist who approached the question of technology and human action from a dialectical viewpoint. His constant concern was the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society. In 2000 the International Jacques Ellul Society was founded by a group of former Ellul students. The society, which includes scholars from a variety of disciplines, is devoted to continuing Ellul's legacy and discussing the contemporary relevance and implications of his work. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. January 1912 – 19. May 1994  •  Other names 雅克·埃呂爾, ז'ק אלול
Jacques Ellul photo
Jacques Ellul: 125 quotes7 likes

Jacques Ellul Quotes

“The social body that had been effectively threatened by the diffusion of a faith that bordered on anarchism, on a total lack of interest in worldly matters (administration, commerce, etc.), … reacted in self-defense and absorbed the foreign body, making it serve its own ends.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 21

“Cain is completely dissatisfied with the security granted to him by God, and so he searches out his own security. … He will satisfy his desire for eternity by producing children, and he will satisfy his desire for security by creating a place belonging to him, a city.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), pp. 4-5

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

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

Vintage, p. 41
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)

“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.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 383

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

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

The Technological Society (1954)

“Mankind in the technological world is prepared to give up his independence in exchange for all kinds of facilities and in exchange for consumer products and a certain security. In short, in exchange for a package of welfare provisions offered to him by society. As I was thinking about that I couldn't help recalling the story in the Bible about Esau and the lentil broth. Esau, who is hungry, is prepared to give up the blessings and promise of God in exchange for some lentil broth. In the same way, modern people are prepared to give up their independence in exchange for some technological lentils.”

Jacques Ellul

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

“Thought based on images can be neither abstract nor critical. … again in this case intellectuals have worked out theories to justify the inevitable. For unconsciously, they could not avoid being subjected to the enormous weight of billions of images (just like other people). Yet consciously, they were well aware that maintaining the demands of critical and independent thought involves a complete break with the rest of humankind. This would make it impossible for them to play their role as genuine intellectuals. They must think like everyone else if they expect to be at all believed by the masses. Thus their conscious and unconscious minds agree in taking them down the path of thought that involves images, evidence, and emotivity.”

Jacques Ellul

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

“We seem to have here a fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus that a little evil or error will corrupt the whole (like the leaven of the Pharisees). … Christians and the church have wanted an alliance with everything that represents power in the world. In reality this rests on the conviction that thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit the powers of this world have been vanquished and set in service of the gospel, the church, and mission. We must use their forces in the interest of evangelism. … But what happens is the exact opposite. The church and mission are penetrated by the power and completely turned aside from their truth by the corruption of power. When Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world, he says clearly what he intends to say. He does not validate any worldly kingdom”

Jacques Ellul

even if the ruler be a Christian
Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 20-21

“I know many people who like watching commercials because they're so funny. They provide relaxation and diversion. People come home after a day's work, from which they derive little satisfaction, and feel the need for diversion and amusement. The word diversion itself is already very significant. When Pascal uses the word diversion he means that people who follow the path of God deviate from the path which leads them to God as a result of diversion and amusement. Instead of thinking of God, they amuse themselves. So, instead of thinking about the problems which have been created by technology and our work we want to amuse ourselves.”

Jacques Ellul

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

“The combination of Christian truth and political power led to the creation of the complex that we know so well. … The emperor endows the church handsomely, helps it in all that it does, aids it in its “mission.” The church supports the emperor’s legitimacy and assures him that he is God’s representative on earth.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 124

“Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), pp. 382-383

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

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 40

“The church … is always at the service of the political power that is either in place or in course of being installed. It goes on to serve the Holy Roman Empire but also the kings of France who split off from it. It will bless all the monarchs who seize power in ways that are tragic, tempestuous, and often bloody and unjust.. It legitimizes everything. This is logical once it associates itself with the existing power.”

Jacques Ellul

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

“Sight, when used in the context of nature, creates direct communication with reality. It implies that one is involved in this particular reality and quickly leads a person to action. But when the image has become artificial and is purely a means of knowledge, the reaction persists. I feel directly involved in what I see, just as prehistoric people did. And if I am seeing objects or ideas, I am not truly independent; I cannot really take my distance from these objects. From the intellectual point of view, this means I cannot really exercise my critical faculties. The use of images to transmit knowledge leads to the progressive elimination of distance between a person and his knowledge, because of the way we are made to participate when this means is used (this is, of course, in perfect accord with technical civilization, and to be desired by its standards). The critical faculties and autonomy of the thinking person are also eliminated.”

Jacques Ellul

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 212
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction’s triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought.”

Jacques Ellul

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

“…there is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 274

“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.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 397

“It was impossible to keep up the great movement of inner and outer freedom initiated by Jesus. The proclamation “You are free through the Holy Spirit,” and Paul’s statement, “Everything is lawful,” were fine for a small, elite group in which everyone knew everyone else. But when it was a matter of thousands of new converts whose depth of faith could not be known, how could they be told that they were completely free to choose their way of life and decide their own conduct? They had to be incorporated and put under the authority of a head of each group, and the more numerous they became, the more sacred and complex this authority had to be. … The glorious freedom that is in Christ could not be tolerated. It was replaced by clear and strict commandments.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 36-37

“The question now is whether people are prepared or not to realize that they are dominated by technology. And to realize that technology oppresses them, forces them to undertake certain obligations and conditions them. Their freedom begins when they become conscious of these things. For when we become conscious of that which determines our life we attain the highest degree of freedom.”

Jacques Ellul

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

“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

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 21

““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

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

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

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 142

“The problem is not merely that of the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles, the “prophecies,” the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and formulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set of beliefs.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 40

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

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

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

“The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. I refer here to ordinary people and not to an intellectual elite. We do not involve ourselves in studying the meaning and consequences of a fact calmly and objectively. The fact asserts itself through its image and associates itself in unchallengeable fashion with other images which, in this mode of thinking, are its true context. Emotions justify as well as provoke or command opinions, which still seem intellectual and reasoned.”

Jacques Ellul

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 211
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“But if technique demands the participation of everybody, this means that the individual is reduced to a few essential functions which make him a mass man. He remains 'free', but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 207

“The church buys the possibility of maintaining itself sat the price of concessions. … In so doing it disavows its martyrs. [Martyrs] want to obey God, not men. But the church trades its support for advantages, honors, titles and money. It comes under the rule of mammon. Finally, it lets itself be bought so as to gain facilities for its celebrations, its evangelism, its good works, its preaching of the good Word. But Satan rejoices at all this, for as this gospel is not based on the cornerstone, on Jesus Christ, but on the power of the world thanks to which it is propagated.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 127

“The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 132

“Once the church is ready to associate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power. It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of its propaganda.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 126

“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. … The individual must be fashioned by techniques … in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 138

“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

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 113

“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.”

Jacques Ellul

Si tu es le Fils de Dieu (1991), p. 76

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead."”

Jacques Ellul

Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as “saints” whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 32

“Very quickly the church found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First, he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? … Again, Jesus says, “Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and then come and follow me.” How are we to take this? …
The way opens, then, for the sapping work of theologians of all kinds, then of lawyers, in an attempt to explain that Jesus wanted to say something other than what is written, or that these commandments are meant only for a spiritual elite and are simply counsels for others, or that the order given to the rich young ruler was meant for him alone. In other words, the texts have been wrested in all kinds of ways so that we should not be driven into a corner or forced to recognize the distance between God and us.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 41-42

“Cain has built a city. For God's Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 5

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

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 96

“Technique shapes an aristocratic society, which in turn implies aristocratic government. Democracy in such a society can only be a mere appearance. Even now, we see in propaganda the premises of such a state of affairs. When it comes to state propaganda, there is no longer any question of democracy.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 275

“Jesus told his disciples they were a little flock. All his comparisons tend to show that the disciples will necessarily be small in number and weak: the leaven in the dough, the salt in the soup, the sheep among wolves, and many other metaphors. Jesus does not seem to have had a vision of a triumphant and triumphal church encircling the globe. He always depicts for us a secret force that modifies things from within.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 35

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

Jacques Ellul

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

“Perfect freedom, spiritual as well as political or social, … is accomplished in us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. … But it is strictly intolerable in the fullness of its implications. It is psychologically unbearable. It carries frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form of power. It was not possible. On every social level and in every culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom and accept its implications. This is the basic impossibility, the unanimous refusal of all people, which has resulted in the rejection of Christian freedom.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 43

“Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impossible in the context of Christianity that is already off the rails, that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the motive power in politics.”

Jacques Ellul

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 123

“Cain is not the city and Abel is not the country; but the relationship between them also illuminates … the relationship between the city and the country. … The city was, from the day of its creation, incapable, because of the motives behind its construction, of any other destiny than that of killing the country, where God put man to enable him to life his life as best he could.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 8

“The Scriptures … tell us what man wanted to do when he created the city, what he was hoping to conquer, what he thought to establish. And this narrative of the origin of the city is essential, for we see there in its purest state, and expressed simply, the feelings of the builders. Such feelings are no longer evident in our modern day when the prodigious complexity of the world hides the simple plans of the never-changing human heart.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

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

“Urban civilization is warring civilization.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 13

“Why freedom? If we accept that God is love, and that it is human beings who are to respond to this love, the explanation is simple. Love cannot be forced, ordered, or made obligatory. It is necessarily free. If God liberates, it is because he expects and hopes that we will come to know him and love him.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 39

“It is impossible for the state or society or an institution to be Christian. Since being Christian presupposes an act of faith, it is plainly impossible for an abstraction like the state.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 28

“In his cynical way Napoleon said that the clergy control the people, the bishops the clergy, and he himself the bishops. No one could state more clearly the real situation that the church was an agent of state propaganda.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 28

“We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 16

“Should anarchists vote? ... For my part, like many anarchists, I think not. To vote is to take part in the organization of the false democracy that has been set up forcefully by the middle class. ... The political game can produce no important changes in our society and we must radically refuse to take part in it.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 14