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Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the "others," who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behavior, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace.

— Ecologie et politique by André Gorz (Page 95)

The point is not to deify nature or to “go back” to it, but to take account of a simple fact: human activity finds in the natural world its external limits. Disregarding these limits sets off a backlash whose effects we are already experiencing in specific, though still widely misunderstood, ways: new diseases and new forms of dis-ease, maladjusted children (but maladjusted to what?), decreasing life expectancy, decreasing physical yields and economic pay-offs, and a decreasing quality of life despite increasing levels of material consumption.

— Ecologie et politique by André Gorz

“We live in a society, and an epoch, where we do not have time to think any longer. We live in a time when taking a step back and a deep breath have become a luxury that many cannot afford.

We live in a world where the mainstream education system teaches you to obey and listen to authority from the earliest age and does not offer you the chance to think for yourself and express yourself in ways that are outside the proclaimed norm. We live in a society where the "nothing" (shopping, watching TV) has become a "something" and the "something" (relaxing, meditating, sharing) has become a void in need of being filled. Our minds, our souls, have slowly been corrupted by materialistic nothingness that has been created for us, billboarded in front of our eyes, and printed, tattooed on our cells by advertising, marketing, and vulture capitalism.“

— Palestina e Israele by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky