Ivan Illich

[Energy and Equity (1974)]

The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets, He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. 

And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. 

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic, instead of 28 per cent. 

What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

[paragraph breaks added] 

William Irwin Thompson

From The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life

[In America,] history is replaced by movies, education is replaced with entertainment ... Entertainment has now replaced education as the basic process of socialization.

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Disneyism is the world's cleverest and most successful new religion.... Attacks ... are, like the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians against the railroads, just simply not powerful enough to stop the electronic spread of Disneyism, Hollywood movies and TV programs, rock and roll, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds.

Noam Chomsky

From On Power and Ideology

The true domino theory is the threat of the good example: that a tiny and impoverished country with minuscule resources might succeed in social and economic development outside the framework of U.S. control.

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If anything is freely discussed [in American media], it is probably unimportant.

Richard Rorty

I wrote this down (in 1981) as “From a Rorty rebuttal”

The fallacious inference from 'better for mastering' to 'more objective' is just a quirky, though central, feature of Western metaphysical tradition.... 

Liking Bohr and disliking Skinner ... [is just] expressing a preference for predicting rocks over doing anything else with them and for doing other things with people over predicting their  behavior. Yes, Skinner is dotty, but physicists are equally dotty to think they view nature naked, unveiled by human concerns.

G. H. Hardy

[A] science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

Aldous Huxley

From Eyeless in Gaza

I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts rather on people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.

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So who said I want to be a saint or achieve anything? I don't. I want to be, completely; develop all one's potentialities. I want to know.... Single-mindedness costs you your liberty. You're a prisoner.