Science Quote by Jean Rostand

There is a particular sting in overhearing yourself in someone else’s mouth: it feels like theft, even when it’s just coincidence. Rostand, a biologist who spent his career watching how life replicates and mutates, turns that lab-grade attention on the ego. The offense isn’t really about ownership of ideas; it’s about trust. When another person voices your private thought, you’re forced to confront a fact most of us prefer to keep blurry: thoughts aren’t sacred possessions, they’re signals. And signals can be mimicked.

The line’s quiet brutality is in its diagnosis of why we recoil. “We are not sure enough of their souls” isn’t mystical so much as psychological. We don’t just want agreement; we want moral alignment. If someone we dislike, distrust, or don’t fully know articulates our view, the thought becomes contaminated by association. Suddenly we’re asking: are they saying it for the same reasons, with the same restraints, toward the same ends? If not, then our idea feels less like a conviction and more like a weapon that can be picked up by anyone.

Rostand wrote in a century where scientific language, political ideology, and propaganda routinely borrowed each other’s authority. In that context, the remark reads like an ethical warning: shared words don’t guarantee shared conscience. The discomfort is a kind of self-defense, a reflex against being drafted into someone else’s motives.