Science & Tech Quote by George E. Brown, Jr.

There’s a particular kind of political idealism that doesn’t run on slogans or nostalgia, but on blueprints. George E. Brown, Jr. frames his life not as a climb toward power, but as a long experiment in governance: take a “utopian vision,” run it through science, and produce a “better world” that can be built, funded, and measured. For a politician, that’s a telling self-portrait. He’s not claiming moral purity or perfect judgment; he’s claiming method.

The phrase “science could be the basis” does quiet rhetorical work. Science isn’t presented as a tool to win arguments, but as an alternative foundation for politics itself - a way to replace tribal loyalties and short-term dealmaking with something closer to evidence, engineering, and public investment. The utopianism is softened by “could,” a modal verb that admits uncertainty while still insisting on direction. It’s faith, but disciplined faith.

Subtextually, Brown is staking out a minority position in American public life: technocratic optimism. Coming of age in the mid-20th century, he’s drawing on an era when federal research, NASA-scale ambition, and postwar prosperity made “progress” feel like an institutional choice, not a personal fantasy. Read against the late-century backlash - culture-war distrust of experts, budget cutting, and the idea that government can’t do big things - the line feels like both defense and lament.

“I’ve been trying to do” is the most political part: not a promise of arrival, but an argument for sustained commitment. Utopia here isn’t a destination; it’s a rationale for keeping the machinery of democracy pointed toward the measurable.