Bruno Latour Quotations

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 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.

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

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

The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics.

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

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.

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.

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

Technology is society made durable.

My kingdom for a more embodied body

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.

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.

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

Reality is what resists.