151 Quotes by Jacques Ellul

We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man’s ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.

Despite the conviction that our era is revolutionary, we must also recognize that under the appearance of movement and development we are in fact living in complete stasis. There is undoubtedly much chaos and violence, there is technical progress, there are social and political experiments. But in reality our world is static, because its structures remain absolutely fixed and its development unfolds along a completely expected rather than revolutionary path.

Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.

The human being is changing slowly under the pressure of the economic milieu; he is in process of becoming the uncomplicated being the liberal economist constructed.

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

The machine is a tool. But it is not a neutral tool. We are deeply influenced by the machine while using it.

I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.