Quotes from Bruno Latour

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

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.

Technology is society made durable.

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

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.

My kingdom for a more embodied body

The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it's people to abject poverty.

There is no control and no all-powerful creator, either – no more 'God' than man – but there is care, scruple, cautiousness, attention, contemplation, hesitation and revival.

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

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.

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?

You who are on the inside, don't condemn my lack of faith too quickly; you who are on the outside, don't be too quick to mock my overcredulity; you who are indifferent, don't be too quick to wax ironic about my perpetual hesitations.

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

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.

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.

To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.

The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.

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

In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the 'Glorious Alliance' between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.

Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.

The difficulty lies in the very expression "relation to the world," which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.

And here I want to interject and say that Heidegger is an absolute occasionalist and has no theory of time despite "time" being included in the title Being and Time

If, of course, to serial and redescription you add… how would I put it, punctual? …Or the key with which they maintain their subsistence. And in that sense serial redescription seems to be a very good definition for the social sciences as well as for philosophy. We accompany the task of the entities in their survival, so to speak, and their maintaining their subsistence in a very, very practical manner.