“Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.”
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
"Water", p. 114
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
“Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”
— Jasper Fforde, book Lost in a Good Book
Source: Lost in a Good Book
Last update June 3, 2021. History
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Jasper Fforde75
British novelist 1961Related quotes
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Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 471.
L'art pour l'art signifie, pour les adeptes, un travail dégagé de toute préoccupation autre que celle du beau en lui-même.
L'art moderne (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856) p. 151; F. W. Ruckstull Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great (New York: Putnam, 1925) p. 299
“To enjoy—to love a thing for its own sake and for no other reason.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy
William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch
Ordinary Men and Women
Naked Lunch (1959)
Context: The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.