“No man can be held throughout the day by what happens throughout the night. ”

1930s, State of the Union Address (1935)
Context: Throughout the world, change is the order of the day. In every Nation economic problems, long in the making, have brought crises of many kinds for which the masters of old practice and theory were unprepared. In most Nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient Governments are beginning to heed the call.
Thus, the American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change. We seek it through tested liberal traditions, through processes which retain all of the deep essentials of that republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world by the United States.

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Source: Martin the Warrior

Philosophy and Living (1939)
Context: Throughout man's career intelligence and charity have been man's distinctive and most valuable assets. One of our early pre-human ancestors is said to have been much like the Spectral Tarsier, a little mammal about the size of a mouse, with long wiry fingers and huge forward-looking eyes adapted for binocular vision. Not by weapons but by correlation of subtle eyes and subtle hands through subtle brain, this creature triumphed. And man himself conquered the world by the same means, by attention, by discrimination, by skilled manipulation, by versatility; in fact by intelligence and imagination in adapting himself to an ever-changing environment.

Source: Immortal Beloved

Interview in Le Monde (1981), as quoted in "A short biography of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)" by Patrick Chastenet, as translated by Lesley Graham http://www.ellul.org/bio_e1.html

The Romantic Agony, p. 158
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

The Virtual Revolution, episode 1: "The Great Levelling?" (BBC2, 30 January 2010). Quoted in Tim Dowling, "Mo; The Virtual Revolution" http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/jan/31/mo-virtual-revolution-tv-review, guardian.co.uk (31 January 2010).