"Ce n'est pas la technique qui nous asservit mais le sacré transféré à la technique (...) Ce n'est pas l'Etat qui nous asservit (...), c'est sa transfiguration sacrale (...)"
- Jacques Ellul, Les nouveaux possédés, Paris, Fayard, 1973, p. 259.
"J'ai montré sans cesse la technique comme étant autonome, je n'ai jamais dit qu'elle ne pouvait pas être maîtrisée."
- Jacques Ellul, Changer de révolution, Paris, Seuil, 1982, p. 224.
"Par conviction spirituelle, je ne suis pas seulement non violent mais je suis pour la non-puissance. Ce n'est sûrement pas une technique efficace. (...) Mais c'est ici qu'intervient pour moi la foi. (...) On ne peut pas créer une société juste avec des moyens injustes. On ne peut pas créer une société libre avec des moyens d'esclaves. C'est pour moi le centre de ma pensée."
- Patrick Chastenet, Entretiens avec Jacques Ellul, Paris, La Table Ronde, 1994, p. 52.
I do not limit myself to describing my feelings with cold objectivity in the manner of a research worker reporting what he sees under a microscope. I am keenly aware that I am myself involved in technological civilization, and that its history is also my own. I may be compared rather with a physician or physicist who is describing a group situation in which he is himself involved. The physician in an epidemic, the physicist exposed to radioactivity: in such situations the mind may remain cold and lucid, and the method objective, but there is inevitably a profound tension of the whole being.
- JE in The Technological Society, author's foreward to Revised American Edition
Some of us have read him as a great commentator on the Bible, others, as a philosopher of technology. But few have seen him as the man who simultaneously challenges the reflection of both the philosopher and the believer. He reminds the philosopher of technology, who studies patent, observable phenomena, to be aware of the possibility that his subject may be too terrible to be grasped by reason alone. And he leads the believer to deepen his Biblical faith and eschatological hope in the face of two uncomfortable and disturbing truths...[that of] modern technique and its malevolent consequences [and that of the] subversion of the Gospel -- its transformation into an ideology called Christianity.
- Ivan Illich, "An Address to 'Master Jacques'," The Ellul Forum 13 (July 1994), page 16.
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