Science Quote by James Bryant Conant

Polite manners can be a kind of camouflage, and Conant is pointing to the rage that camouflage provokes in anyone trained to notice what it hides. The target isn’t simple wrongdoing; it’s wrongdoing with good posture. “Superficially correct” implies a social world that rewards appearances - credentials, etiquette, institutional rituals - while “intrinsically corrupt” names the rot underneath: compromised motives, self-dealing, bad faith. The irritation he describes is moral and psychological at once. When corruption wears the costume of virtue, it doesn’t just harm; it mocks the very standards it pretends to honor.

Conant’s wording also reveals a scientist-administrator’s sensibility. As president of Harvard during the mid-century expansion of American expertise, he lived inside systems where legitimacy often came from formal correctness: peer review, committee process, official language. Those systems are necessary, but they’re also easy to game. His line reads like a warning from someone who’s watched procedure become a shield - the way a clean lab coat or a well-phrased memo can launder unethical choices.

The subtext is a quiet defense of discernment as a civic duty. People “who see below the surface” are cast as a minority: the skeptical, the experienced, the ones with enough knowledge to detect inconsistency between performance and reality. Their irritation isn’t mere snobbery; it’s the emotional cost of living among plausible liars. Conant isn’t reassuring us that corruption will be obvious. He’s saying the more expertly it mimics the good, the more it offends.