151 Quotes by Jacques Ellul

Efficiency is a fact and justice a slogan.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact.

To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces... but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate – and expected – action.

In the world everyone wants to be a ‘wolf,’ and no one is called to play the part of ‘sheep.’ Yet the world cannot live without this living witness of sacrifice. That is why it is essential that Christians should be very careful not to be ‘wolves’ in the spiritual sense – that is, people who try to dominate others. Christians must accept the domination of other people, and offer the daily sacrifice of their lives, which is united with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

He judges the present time in virtue of a meta-historical fact, and the incursion of this event into the present is the only force capable of throwing off the dead weight of social and political institutions which are gradually crushing the life out of our present civilization.

We share in the sin of the world. We are involved in it because in spite of our faith we are and remain sinners; we are also involved in the sin of humanity through the various ‘orders’ of life created by God, so that when a an of my family, or of my nation, commits a sin, I am responsible before God for this transgression. Only this truth must not remain merely a verbal one.

The primary element in any civilization is a stable relation between man and his environment. When man becomes the plaything of abstract decisions, a civilization can no longer be created.

The two things cannot be separated. Truth must incarnate itself in reality; reality is empty without truth. If truth is the unfolding of meaning, this is the meaning of what we see to be real and not of an illusion or dream or phantom. This is how it is with us.

Faith has to come to birth as a free act, not a forced one. Otherwise it has no meaning.