« The birth of the show is the birth of civilization. The end of the show is the return of barbarism, of which we are not far away. (p.83). »

« The "it's beautiful": more than a quality patent, a certificate of durability. »

« We do not have to swear an oath to the signs of the legions, much less to kiss the slipper. We are not substitutes or stooges, but users. Our devices are masters of thinking. How the government by standards, otherwise more painless and less costly than by blockades and fines, is a model of saving forces. It is a square setting (the meaning of norma in Latin) rather than a step-by-step. We prepare and straighten it out, by the only way of use. The pre-emptive standardization of technical systems — education, health, transportation, the media — produces a dynamic that does not present itself as a polemic. It establishes the reference by capillarity. It puts order, its order, in disparate, and the normative steamroller makes appear everything "that resists its application as something twisted, tortuous or left" (Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological). The discrepancy becomes fault, and sometimes negligence or off-piste is punishable by serious penalties. This applies to accounting standards as well as to tax law. »