Science & Tech Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre lands a provocation, then flips it: the clean modern confidence of atheism ("disproved by Science") crashes into the unclean moral reality of the camp, where survival depends less on cosmology than on the fragile, brutal fact of other people. The line is engineered to irritate both the devout and the rationalist. If God is out, and Science is in, why does the camp - the most "rationalized" machinery of death the 20th century produced - force a new kind of faith?

The subtext is existentialist to the bone: meaning isn’t handed down from above; it’s made under pressure, in the choices humans make when excuses are gone. "Believe in men" doesn’t mean sentimental humanism. In a concentration camp, "men" includes guards, informants, the indifferent, the complicit - the whole spectrum of human freedom and human failure. Sartre’s faith is narrower and harsher: belief that people still act, still decide, still reveal themselves, even when the system tries to reduce them to numbers. That’s also why the phrase stings. It implies that the real metaphysical question isn’t God’s existence but human responsibility.

Context matters, and it complicates the attribution. Sartre was a POW during World War II, not a Nazi camp survivor, and the quote often circulates loosely. That slippage is telling: we like our existentialism with barbed wire, because it gives philosophy the authority of suffering. The line works because it refuses comfort on both fronts. No divine rescue. No scientific absolution. Just the terrifying, necessary wager that humans are what we have - and what we must answer for.