Jacques Ellul Quotes

We are alone on this planet. It's not a choice. Here we are. This is what everyone has to deal with.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

It is not what you say or hope or wish or intend but only what you do that counts. Your choices tell you unerringly who you really are.

What is fruitful alone is true.

I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we're programmed to believe what we're told. We're programmed to believe them. We're programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe.

It comes down to a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother, and I'm going with the Sisters.

We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people its not, but for me its a choice, and you dont get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if its a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesnt matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

The world is against individuality. It is against your being just your natural self. It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot.

I don’t belong to anyone. I make my own choices." "And you’re with Adrian," said Dimitri. "But I was meant for you.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

Because it's our choices that makes us who we are.

You are, when all is done-just what you are.

The political and substantive reality is that the agenda has to change. I don't think they have any choice.

All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold. I will buy a chair for my house. What style of chair are you gonna buy? Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived. I mean, why bother choosing a chair because it looks a certain way? Because there's gonna be something about that chair that says something about you.

How can I be a man if there is no role model?

We are what we are.

You've got to make choices that make sense for you because there's always going to be somebody who'll think you should do something differently.

Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.

"What makes a man a man?" a friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.

For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.