Robert N. Proctor Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

In early October of 1939, designated by the government as the year of "the duty to be healthy," Hitler authored a secret memo certifying that "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt are hereby commissioned to allow certain specified doctors to grant a mercy death [Gnadentod] to patients judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination."

Robert N. Proctor
The rejection of concern for practical goals expressed in the German Society for Sociology's founding charter represented the culmination of a debate in the Social Policy Association, the so-called Werturteilsstreit, in which a group of young political economists, including Ferdinand Tonnies, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, attacked the older generation of political economists for mixing facts and values, science and politics.

Robert N. Proctor
Why do we know what we know and why don't we know what we don't know? What should we know and what shouldn't we know? How might we know differently?

Robert N. Proctor
The ideal of value neutrality is not a single notion, but has arisen in the course of protracted struggles over the place that science should have in society.

Robert N. Proctor
By contrast with diamonds or asbestos or granite or the minerals we burn for fuel, the lowly agate is the victim of scientific disinterest, the same kinds of structured apathy I have elsewhere called 'the social construction of ignorance.' Agates seem to fall outside the orbit of geological knowledge, and therefore tend to be regarded — if at all — as geological accidents or oddities not really deserving systematic study.

Robert N. Proctor
Nazi philosophers also commonly expressed concerns about cruelty toward animals. In early 1933, Nazi representatives in the Prussian parliament called for legislation banning vivisection.

Robert N. Proctor
The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating (with his wife, Anna Schapire-Neurath) Francis Gallon's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are "independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns."

Robert N. Proctor
In March 1937 the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on the case of a farmer who had shot to death his sleeping son because the child was "mentally ill in a manner that threatened society"

Robert N. Proctor
We live in a golden age of ignorance, and Trump and Brexit are part of that.

Robert N. Proctor
One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest anti-smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe -- Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco -- were all non-smokers

Robert N. Proctor
The appropriate critique of... sciences is not that they are not "objective" but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective (that is true, or reliable) being in the service of interests.

Robert N. Proctor
Neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing. Neutrality refers to whether science takes a stand; objectivity, to whether science merits claims to reliability. The two need not have anything to do with each other. Certain sciences may be completely "objective" — that is, valid — and yet designed to serve certain political interests.

Robert N. Proctor
It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences.

Robert N. Proctor