Bruno Latour Quotes

Machines are the concealed wishes of actants which have tamed forces so effectively that they no longer look like forces

You who are on the inside, this world terrifies you because, according to you, it's 'without a divine master'. But don't you see that it's also without a human master? You who are on the outside, this call for renewal of 'God' horrifies you because, according to you, it would bring back the old tyranny of the divine. Don't you see that this world is forever without a creator?

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.

What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish, the "enemy of promises" as Lindsay Waters calls him, believes he defends science studies, my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball? What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn't I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?

Science does not enter a chaotic society to put order into it anymore, to simplify its composition, and to put an end to controversies. It does enter it, but to add new uncertain ingredients ... to all the other ingredients that make up the collective experiments. When scientists add their findings to the mix, they do not put an end to politics; they add new ingredients to the collective process.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.

Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy.

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.

India is a reservoir of alternative interpretations of what the global is, and these ways of viewing the world need to be exposed.

Using a slogan from ANT, you have 'to follow the actors themselves', that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts best define the new associations that they have been forced to established.

Alas, the historical name is 'actor-network-theory', a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept.

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.

My interest is that there is a disconnect between the science and the size of the threat that people mention about nature, the planet and the climate, and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep pretty well.

The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don't know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol!

What is an organization actually, even in organization theory, even in the most classical sense in management, if not a serial redescription which starts again (and it's true) every morning.

Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them

Be not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers arenas in which to gather.

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

We would be better off thinking of nature as a tiger than as a docile and compliant automaton that can never threaten our survival.