The dynamic of modern societies rests on a perpetual flight into the future which creates an illusion of stability; it holds together an organism in a perpeptual state of transformation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 101

Nowadays, with the most wonderful communications equipment imaginable, we are broadcasting a culture which is at best an absence of culture, a product of chance.

Jacques Ellul, as quoted in Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 97

The idea that generalized aggression can be refined into peaceful competition, profitable to all, is the great myth of liberalism, and it assumes that the hypothesis of the harmony of interests is proven – which is far from being the case – and that the search for wealth is an end in itself, unconnected with the will to power and the struggle for power – a notion which is immediately contradicted by observation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 75

The aim of bourgeois ethics, to eliminate all forms of death and impose the value of life, without qualification, could only take root where biological death was actually seen as undesirable. Of course, traditional societies attach strong meaning to death, poverty or sickness; but the exalting of biological life as the supreme value is inhuman and, by its qualitative density, destroys the very meaning of existence. The West, by disenchanting the world, has made life on this earth into the value par excellence. When you no longer have eternity before you, life becomes an anxious struggle against time. Earthly time may become infinite, but this infiniteness only gives unlimited scope to the anxiety of modern man. The infinite accumulation of works is a phantasmagorical substitute for immortality. This obsessive fight against time, disregarding the enjoyment of the present moment, is characteristic of Western man.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) pp. 55-56

Modern society, by 'inventing' economics – i.e. by creating an autonomous 'sphere' for the production, distribution and consumtion of material wealth, a sphere in which it is legitimate and necessary to allocate means as efficiently as possible – has reduced culture to the narrower preoccupations of the 'Ministries of Culture' possessed by many civilized nations. This reduction originates in Western metaphysics, which, since Plato, have been accustomed to splitting the unity of being into matter and spirit. This presumably means that culture becomes no more than the awareness (perhaps a false awareness) which a society has of its 'material' practices through religion, art and all its means of expression.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 39

Vad har gjort det omöjligt för oss att leva i tiden så som fiskarna i vattnet, så som fåglarna i luften, så som barn? Det är kejsardömets fel! Idén att upprätta och bevara ett kejsardöme har skapat historiens tid. Kejsardömet har inte förlagt sin existens till årstidscykelns mjukt återkommande tid, utan till ryckig tid som hör samman med uppgång och fall, med början och slut, med katastrof. Kejsardömet dömer sig att leva i historien och stämpla mot historien. Endast en tanke upptar kejsardömets undermedvetna: hur det ska bära sig åt för att inte upphöra, inte dö, utan förlänga sin era.

J. M. Coetzee, I Väntan På Barbarerna (Brombergs, 2002) p. 177

But we do not repeat a beginning by reducing it to something past and now known, which need merely be initiated; no, the beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true beginning.

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Anchor Books, 1961) p. 32

All capitalists and financiers, as well as any homo economicus (meaning all of us), tend to become ordinary 'criminals' who collude to some extent in the economic banality of evil.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity, 2009) p.19