Time & Perspective Quote by Jacques Ellul

Ellul treats language less like a label-maker and more like a live wire: charged, relational, and dangerous to handle as mere abstraction. Calling the word "dialectical" suggests it is never neutral or finished; it exists in tension, formed by conflict, reply, contradiction, and social pressure. A word only becomes what it is inside an argument with reality and with other people. Meaning is negotiated, not deposited.

The second move is bolder: the word is "integrated into the whole of existence". Ellul is pushing back against the modern habit (especially in technocratic societies) of treating language as a tool we wield from a safe distance. In his broader work on propaganda, technique, and the ways systems colonize human life, he worries that words get stripped of embodied consequence - turned into slogans, data points, or ideological tokens. He insists the opposite: language is welded to how we inhabit the world. Speak differently and you don't merely describe a new world; you begin to live in one.

"Intended to be lived" is the ethical sting. Ellul implies a judgment on intellectual culture that prizes verbal brilliance without existential cost: the clean rhetoric, the fashionable theory, the political vocabulary that never reaches the hands. He is also quietly theological here (Ellul was a Christian anarchist): "word" carries echoes of Logos, of speech as action and commitment, not commentary. The subtext is uncompromising: if your words do not alter your conduct, they are not just empty; they are false.