Jacques Ellul Quotes

Passive resistance and boycotting are now prominent features of every great national movement.

Non-cooperation is directed not against men but against measures. It is not directed against the Governors, but against the system they administer. The roots of non-cooperation lies not in hatred but in justice if not in love.

A little rebellion is a good thing.

I resolved that no revolutionary movement was going to be brought into being in the USA unless I brought it into being.

One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.

Mass civil disobedience was for the attainment of independence.

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

This campaign of non-cooperation has no reference to diplomacy, secret or open. The only diplomacy it admits of is the statement and pursuance of truth at any cost.

In satyagraha, a courted imprisonment carries its own praise.

Satyagraha thrives on repression till at last the repressor is tired of it and the object of satyagraha is gained.

Disobedience is the vehicle of progress.

Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible.

The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.

Civil disobedience is a viable political tactic, and a non-violent tactic.

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Without satyagraha carried out in the proper spirit, there is no victory, no Swaraj.

That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers [who] don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.

It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.

Civil disobedience is a stimulation for the fighters and a challenge to the opponent, in the present instance, authority.

I hope that even if I go to jail, it will motivate more and more Hongkongers to commit to determine our future, instead of fully relying on those ruling class who have dominated our future.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.

You're either an activist or an inactivist. I want to stop this.