Victor Papanek Quotes

Writing in certain environments carries with it an occupational risk.

It was also my experience at Hull-House that aroused my interest in industrial diseases.

In 1896 one out of every 11 steel workers would die on the job.

Injuries are part of the job.

Really, being a librarian is a much more dangerous job than you realize.

There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in.

Is there discrimination against women? Yes, like the old boys' network. And sometimes discrimination against women becomes discrimination against men: in hazardous fields, women suffer fewer hazards.

Latinos are disproportionately more likely to be injured on the job than other ethnic groups.

In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85.

Mining is a dangerous profession. There's no way to make a mine completely safe: These are the words owners have always used to excuse needless deaths and the words miners use to prepare for them.

Ask the widows and orphans of the thousands of men killed annually through the avarice of railroad corporations refusing to avail themselves of modern appliances in coupling and other improvements on their railroads. Inquire from the thousands of women and children whose husbands or fathers were suffocated or crushed in the mines through the rapacious greed of stockholders clamoring for more dividends.

[Industrialists] maim and slaughter workers by thousands.

It is a reproach to our civilization that any class of American workmen, should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation, be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.

The memory of the 146 people who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire stands as a reminder that legal protections and workplace safety standards were won through a long struggle for social justice and at great human cost.

Normal pain is no problem, that just comes with the job.

Every job carries occupational hazards.

You can be an astronaut, knowing it can be super dangerous but understand intuitively what the risk issues are. Not having the same usable knowledge about the risk of football, or any line of work, doesn't work.

Whether it was the Alaskan pipeline disaster or the Texas City refinery fire where 15 people died, time after time it's been shown that BP chooses expediency over safety.

There is what might be called a Catch-22 of hazardous occupations: The more hazardous the job, the more men; the more men, the less we care about making the job safer. The Catch-22 of hazardous occupations creates a 'glass cellar' which few women wish to enter. Women are alienated not just out of the fear of being hurt on the job, but by an atmosphere that can make a hazardous job more hazardous than it needs to be.

I stayed true to what I thought was good design no matter who it was for.

SoHo was called Hell's Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops - without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.

In other words, crew deaths are a feature, not a bug," Cassaway said, dryly.

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.

Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.

The ill design is most ill for the designer.