Jacques Ellul Quotes

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

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.

We humans have a love-hate relationship with our technology. We love each new advance and we hate how fast our world is changing... The robots really embody that love-hate relationship we have with technology.

Isn't it strange that as technology advances, the quality of life frequently declines.

This not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully, and quote aptly.

Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.

Technology is like the 666 because it controls us.

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

Weird how fast technology changes.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

Avoid the spectacle of technology and instead focus on technology and science solving real problems.

I have sometimes thought the power of computers had exceeded our ability to use them, but Mr. Jobs and his team kept giving us devices that made indispensable things easier in ways you never thought of.

The U.S. has always been a global innovation vanguard - driving advancements in computing, communication, and media to rail, automobiles, and aeronautics.

The world is so heavily influenced by technology, and it has started to feel like it's not on solid ground. The world has become unreliable, unknowable. Facts are vulnerable, and things you have come to rely on are no longer there.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

Thank God for machines. They can make a dog sing!

Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

Our age is one of guided missiles and unguided men.

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.