Science Quote by Robert Millikan

Millikan’s line has the cool, clinical confidence of a lab report, but it’s really an argument about modernity disguised as a definition. “Civilization” isn’t measured in virtue, art, or justice; it’s measured in wants. Not needs - wants, the slippery category that expands the moment it’s satisfied. The phrasing “multiplication and refinement” is doing heavy lifting: progress becomes a two-step machine, first creating new appetites, then polishing them into standards. You don’t just want light; you want electric light, then good lighting, then mood lighting, then smart lighting that anticipates you. Each refinement converts yesterday’s luxury into today’s baseline.

As a physicist and public face of early 20th-century American science, Millikan is speaking from inside the era when technical ingenuity was rapidly reorganizing daily life. The subtext is a defense of scientific-industrial expansion: if civilization is the escalation of desire, then the laboratories, factories, and consumer markets that feed desire aren’t corrupting influences; they’re civilization’s engine. It’s a neat moral alibi for growth.

There’s irony here, whether Millikan intended it or not. Defining civilization by wants quietly shifts the project from collective flourishing to managed dissatisfaction. “Refinement” makes it sound tasteful and elevating, but it also implies sorting people by whose wants get refined fastest. The quote flatters the modern consumer as a connoisseur of improvements, while admitting - almost proudly - that the civilizing process never ends because the target is restless by design.