Science Quote by Hermann Oberth

It is the sound of a young scientist turning a bureaucratic slight into rocket fuel. Oberth, who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for modern rocketry, isn’t performing humility here; he’s staging a private rebellion against the credential gatekeepers of his day. “I refrained from writing another one” hints at an institutional system that doesn’t just evaluate ideas, but forces would-be innovators to plead, revise, and flatter their way into legitimacy. His refusal is tactical: he withdraws from the ritual, then announces a different arena where the judges have less power.

The sting is in “some of you.” It’s not a noble vow to serve science; it’s a pointed score-settling with specific people who treated the title “doctor” as the passport to being heard. Oberth’s subtext is brutally modern: status is often mistaken for competence, and the establishment will protect its own vocabulary of legitimacy even when it can’t keep up with the imagination. By framing greatness as something he will “prove,” he shifts authority away from committees and toward outcomes, the only metric that can’t be waved away by etiquette.

Context matters. Early 20th-century Europe was thick with formal hierarchies and academic patronage, while fields like astronautics still looked fringe, half-science and half-dream. Oberth’s line captures that tension: the future arriving through a side door, with no credentials, insisting that discovery doesn’t need permission slips.