Jacques Ellul Quotes

I think that anybody can become a terrorist. That's my point of view. But, not everybody can actually kill. In order to reach that level, you have to be deeply convinced.

We stand on the watershed dividing the past from the future. Let us bury the past in so far as it is dead and forget all bitterness and recrimination. Let there be moderation in speech and writing.... There has been violence—shameful, degrading and revolting violence—in various parts of the country. This must end. We are determined to end it. We must make it clear that political ends ae not to be achieved by methods of violence now or in the future.

Murder is not absolved of immortality by committing murder. Murder is absolved of immorality by bringing men to think that murder is not evil. This only the perversion of the mind can bring about. And the perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent.

They say they blame it on a song when someone kills a cop, what music did they listen to when they bombed Iraq?

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.

One less of such monsters in existence is one less who has slaughtered or would slaughter hundreds of victims

The Spaniards have served us with rapine and death. They have violated the sacred rights of human beings, violated capitulations and the most solemn treaties; committed, in fact, every crime. They have reduced the Republic of Venezuela to the most frightful desolation. Thus, then, justice demands vengeance and necessity obliges us to take it

Our vengeance shall rival Spanish ferocity. Our goodwill is at last exhausted; and, since our oppressors compel us to mortal warfare, they shall disappear from America and our land shall be purged of the monsters that infest it. Our hate shall be inexorable and our war shall be to the death.

At no time did I suggest that violence is justice, and I can't believe I even have to explain that. But the alternative is letting someone like Kayleigh McEnany misquote and manipulate what you say. McEnany, who repeatedly lies to the American people.

Man acts only when he is sure of the justness of his action, as we threw the bomb in the Legislative Assembly

Every state and the federal government have laws that protect people from acts of violence, and those laws should be enforced. What I want to see in America is that if you hurt a human being and you bring pain in their life, that's all we need to know. If you did it illegally, you should be prosecuted.

The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing.

Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.

The world would be a much nicer place if people only used guns on themselves.

He, who boldly interposes between a merciless censor and his prey, is a man of vigor: and he who, mildly wise, without wounding, convinces him of his error, commands our veneration.

Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.

If someone stands in the way of true justice, you simply walk up behind them, and stab them in the heart.

To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic.

Hope that justice will be done to those brave men who stood up for their convictions.

How many more people have to die or be afraid or be injured in Chelsea, New York, Erin, for us to wake up?

Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.

The government is responsible for the violence, as long as they don't stop it. And if we have to get violent to protect ourselves, then it's the government that should be charged with the crime, because we're only upholding a law that they've been unable to uphold.

So perish all who do the like again.

I think people are frustrated in this society, where predators prey upon normal, law-abiding citizens, and you never see justice in the courtroom. In my films, the predators don't get away with it.