Science Quote by Vannevar Bush

“A belief may be larger than a fact” lands with the cool provocation of a scientist admitting the limits of his own toolkit. Vannevar Bush wasn’t a mystic; he was a builder of systems, a wartime science administrator, and a key architect of the postwar research state. So when he elevates belief over fact, he’s not endorsing delusion. He’s pointing at a stubborn reality of human affairs: facts don’t automatically scale. Beliefs do.

The line works because “larger” is doing double duty. It suggests scope (beliefs can organize whole lives, institutions, nations) and force (beliefs can overpower the small, sharp edge of an inconvenient datum). A fact is precise, bounded, and often inert until interpreted. A belief is a narrative engine; it recruits allies, hardens into identity, and survives contact with counterevidence by absorbing it as betrayal, conspiracy, or exception. Bush’s phrasing is almost clinical, but the subtext is anxious: modern societies can generate facts faster than they can metabolize them, and the vacuum gets filled by conviction.

Context matters. Bush lived through propaganda wars, the Manhattan Project’s moral aftershocks, and the dawn of “big science,” when expertise became both indispensable and politically suspect. Read this way, the quote is less about epistemology than governance: if you want facts to matter, you can’t just publish them. You have to compete on the terrain where belief already rules - meaning, trust, and purpose.