Langdon Winner > Quotes

“To argue a moral position convincingly these days requires that one speak to (and not depart from) people's love of material well-being, their fascination with efficiency, or their fear of death.”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“A writer must recognize normal standards of scholarly objectivity, give adequate evidence to back up assertions of fact, and proffer arguments in an unbiased, logical way. Observing such standards one says, in effect, what I offer is reliable; any reasonable person equipped with the same points of evidence and logic ought to arrive at similar conclusions. But as important as these standards are, they leave two fundamental questions unanswered. Where does my own personal interest in these topics come from? Why have I chosen to approach them in the way I have?”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“Over many decades technological optimists have been sustained by the belief that whatever happened to be created in the sphere of material/instrumental culture would certainly be compatible with freedom, democracy, and social justice. This amounts to a conviction that all technology—whatever its size, shape, or complexion—is inherently liberating. For reasons noted in the previous chapter, that is a very peculiar faith indeed.”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“Freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility—the demands of the life instinct. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil.”13”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“There is the capitalist approach (make it bigger), the technocratic one (make it better), the ‘revolutionary’ solution (portray the problem as an example of an exploitative system) and the pre-industrial romantic fallacy (don’t use it; maybe it will go away by itself). We propose a fifth alternative response: Let’s invent a different answer.”28”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“While it has wonderful appeal, decentralization turns out to be a very slippery concept. How can it have any importance in a society thoroughly enmeshed in centralized patterns?”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement,”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“Are we going to design and build circumstances that enlarge possibilities for growth in human freedom, sociability, intelligence, creativity, and self-government? Or are we headed in an altogether different direction?”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology