Science & Tech Quote by Al Hirschfeld

“Life isn’t a science. We make it up as we go” reads like a shrug, but it’s really a quiet refusal of the twentieth century’s favorite fantasy: that everything important can be systematized, optimized, and proven. Hirschfeld, the consummate illustrator of performers and public life, spent a century watching Americans treat identity like a role you rehearse in public. His line lands because it’s both anti-authoritarian and oddly comforting. If life isn’t a science, then there’s no lab coat coming to grade your choices.

The subtext is craft. A cartoonist lives by quick decisions: a line that must be confident even when it’s improvised, an exaggeration that feels truer than a photograph. Hirschfeld’s portraits didn’t chase technical exactitude; they chased essence, the social shimmer of a face in motion. That’s the worldview behind the quote: meaning is made, not discovered. The “we” matters. This isn’t solitary genius myth-making; it’s communal, negotiated reality, the everyday collaboration between people, institutions, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Context sharpens it. Born in 1903, Hirschfeld lived through the rise of scientific management, advertising, psychoanalysis, and later the self-help-industrial complex - all promising models for a messy human animal. His sentence punctures that promise without turning cynical. It doesn’t deny facts; it denies the fantasy that facts alone can substitute for judgment, taste, and reinvention. In an era addicted to metrics, it’s a defense of improvisation as adulthood.