The idea of an identical repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a single conception of time. We cannot return to the past, to tradition, to repetition, because these great immobile domains are the inverted image of the earth that is no longer promised to us today.

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Let us not forget that we also owe another dichotomy to the Moderns and to them alone: the dichotomy between respect for ancestors on the one hand, and inventiveness free of ties to the past on the other. Reaction and revolution, tradition and innovation, emerge from the strange notion of time that is itself broken

Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

One of the great values of reading Latour has been seeing how the epistemological problems of modernity are also problems of how moderns think about time.