Science & Tech Quote by Charles Lindbergh

Aviator-as-believer turns confessor here, and the line lands because it treats modernity like a broken romance. Lindbergh isn’t merely lamenting “technology misused”; he’s indicting a whole emotional bargain of the early 20th century: trust the machine, and it will lift humanity. By calling science something he “worshiped,” he admits his own susceptibility to the era’s secular religion of progress. The phrasing implicates him, not just the warmongers. The aircraft are “loved,” not admired, which makes the betrayal intimate. When what you adore becomes what you fear, critique stops being abstract.

The pivot is “expected them to serve.” That single verb exposes the hidden hierarchy: tools are supposed to be obedient, civilization the master. But the 20th century repeatedly reversed the relationship. Aviation, arguably the most glamorous emblem of human ingenuity, becomes a delivery system for mass death and coercion. Lindbergh’s heartbreak is that the most sublime expression of human freedom (flight) can be repurposed into a geometry of targets and firestorms.

Context sharpens the sting. Lindbergh lived at the hinge point where aircraft moved from miracle to instrument of industrial war, and he watched WWII confirm that airpower could terrorize civilians at scale. His later political notoriety, including isolationist activism, complicates the moral posture: this is also a self-defense brief, a way to claim tragic foresight. The line works because it compresses awe, complicity, and disillusionment into one sentence, making progress sound less like a staircase and more like a trapdoor.