The powerlessness of technology remains hidden by people's powerlessness to escape it. Without calling the whole idea of development into question, it seems well-nigh impossible to escape from the totalitarianism of technology.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 79

De-growth, in the sense that it provides the philosophical foundations for a project for an autonomous society, is probably not a humanism because it is based upon a critique of development, growth, progress, technology and, ultimately, modernity and because it implies a break with Western centralism.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 99

A critique of the growth society implies a critique of capitalism, but the converse is not necessarily true. Capitalism, neo-liberal or otherwise, and productivist socialism are both variants on the same project for a growth society based upon the development of the productive forces, which will supposedly facilitate humanity's march in the direction of progress.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 89

The technological and promethean fantasy that we can create an artificial world is a way of rejecting both the world and being.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 35

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

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

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