# Quote — Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

> Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.

- Author: [Jacques Ellul](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul.md)
- Book: [Propaganda](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul/propaganda.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_Men's_Attitudes_(1962)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul/propaganda/propaganda-tries-to-surround

## More from this book

> The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul/propaganda/the-most-favorable.md)

> In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul/propaganda/in-the-midst.md)

> First of all, modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning — and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda, or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus.

p. 4 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jacques-ellul/propaganda/first-of-all.md)