"... This global network of megacities represents the Machine's core.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 85

"...Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice’. Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 84

"...A city's inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 84
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"...75 percent of worldwide energy use is in cities, and energy energy demand is outstripping population growth as those cities expand.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 83
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"...Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it; and a modern world-city sucks in the world. The impacts of this are measurable.
To take just a few examples:..."

"...The sheer scale of the modern urban conglomeration is mind-boggling and entirely irreversible.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 83
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"...This is especially true of the modern megacity with its tens of millions of inhabitants, which bears about as much resemblance to an ancient city as a Reaper drone does to a longbow..."

"...can be seen as a kind of turning-in on ourselves: a radical parochialism.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 80-81
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"...our neighbours, of the seasons, of anything but our own direction and ambition.
The move, then, from country to city—the great shift we have undertaken in just a couple of centuries—..."

"...to one which exists in a new kind of landscape, built entirely by and for us. A farmer, even the modern, industrialised variety, needs to live by the seasons, the weather and the soil. A city dweller doesn't even need to know where his lunch comes from. In the city, we can live ignorant of..."

"...and to listen instead for the old song which, however much we might think otherwise, has never stopped being sung in the woods and the waters and the around the edges of the human heart.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 77-78
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"...Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world, the motto of the Machine. Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger. We all want to live by the first of them, but we know that the work is to walk away from it a thousand times each day: to let the will go,..."

"...It's hard work to change a story, especially when the society around you affirms it at every turn.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 77
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"...To throw it off. If it is ‘the pursuit of the ideals and methods of modern science that has brought us into this catastrophic situation, clearly they can be no issue from it without the renunciation of those ideals and methods.”
~ Paul Kingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 77
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"...If that mentality really is a tyranny—the tyranny of Bacon, Faust and Crowley, the tyranny of our times—then there can only be one response...."