Jacques Ellul Civilization Quotations

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent indivisual intelligence...The individual, in order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization.

Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.