Science & Tech Quote by Simone Weil

Science, for Weil, isn’t a neutral machine for producing facts; it’s a moral instrument that either sharpens the soul or dulls it into obedience. The provocation in her line is how bluntly it rejects the modern prestige economy of knowledge. “Worthless” isn’t anti-intellectual pique. It’s a demand that inquiry answer to something higher than usefulness, status, or national power.

The intent is ascetic: strip science of its self-congratulation and ask what it does to the person doing it. Weil lived amid the wreckage of European “progress” - mechanized war, industrial discipline, bureaucratic cruelty - and she understood that technical brilliance can coexist with spiritual catastrophe. In that light, “nearer to God” reads less like church piety than a shorthand for attention, humility, and the refusal to treat reality as raw material. Her God isn’t a cozy reward; it’s an ethical gravity that pulls the self out of its fantasies of control.

Subtext: a warning about idolatry. Science can become a substitute religion, complete with priesthood, rituals, and a promise of salvation through innovation. Weil flips the script: if science enlarges our sense of mastery but shrinks our capacity for reverence, it’s not enlightenment - it’s another form of domination.

The rhetoric works because it forces an uncomfortable audit. Not “Is it true?” but “What does it make of us?” In an era where research is tethered to grants, patents, and geopolitical competition, her line lands as both rebuke and dare: let knowledge be accountable to the human spirit, or admit it’s just efficient noise.