Jacques Ellul Quotes

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

The National Academy of Sciences would be unable to give a unanimous decision if asked whether the sun would rise tomorrow.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.

If we grant freedom to man, there is an end to the omniscience of God.

if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control…

To say that God's sovereignty is limited by man's freedom is to make man sovereign.

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him.

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

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

Only when he voluntarily chooses that which he inexorably must do, has man any free will at all.

Thou mayest foresee... the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of things now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years.

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

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

A life where bots tell us what to do every second - get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person - is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn't even notice.

We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villians by compulsion.

The fact that the stars predict high or low rank for the father of the person whose horoscope is taken, teaches that they do not always make things happen but sometimes only indicate things. For how could things which preceded the birth depend upon the birth?

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

Fate does not play jokes.

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.

The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

The world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.