A Quote by Jacques Ellul

If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see projected the mirage of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it.
The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.
The bandleader is a musician trying to sell a mass commodity; and in order to do so successfully he must accommodate himself to mass standards. Unless he can do this comfortably, sooner or later he is sunk.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting as part of mass-movements, that it's become hard for us to imagine a form of politics that is based on a high degree of introspection and self-examination.
Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction, homelessness, a weapon of mass destruction... racism, a weapon of mass destruction, fear, a weapon of mass destruction. We must disarm these weapons and renew our commitment to quality public schools and dedicated teachers and good housing and quality health care and decent jobs and stronger neighborhoods.
Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Hunger is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor health care is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor education is a weapon of mass destruction. Discrimination is a weapon of mass destruction. Let us abolish such weapons of mass destruction here at home.
Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
The U.S. generally wants to solve problems with coercion. That's kind of the default way the American state wants to try to solve problems. So there are many parallels between that: mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and militarism.
politics and religion in the United States work like the twin grips of a pair of pliers on a critical mass of the masses.
The mass is the spiritual food that sustains me, without which I could not get through one single day or hour in my life; in the mass we have Jesus in the appearance of bread. While in the slums we see Christ and touch him in the broken bodies, in the abandoned children.
Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.
You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.
But there's always a Mass. It's not a formal Mass at all. We're sitting around her dining room table with wine and Eucharist and holding hands. It's very informal and small, but to me that's a wonderful way to have Mass.
When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.
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