The gist of the disasterly course has never been secret. For decades everything was there, allowing one to understand where the “development” was leading us: its magnificent results were displayed everywhere, at the speed of an oil spill or building of a “new town” on the edge of a highway. The fetishism of quantitative knowledge has made us so inane and so hidebound that one will be seen as a dilettante if he maintains that it would have made a tad of aesthetic sense (not the one which can be gained in art schools) to base judgement on evidence . [...].Stendhal’s maxim remains valid a contrario : Ugliness is nothing other than the promise of unhappiness.
- R. Riesel and J. Semprun, Catastrophe; Administration of Disaster & Sustained Submission