Science & Tech Quote by Eyvind Johnson

Johnson’s line reads like a quiet manifesto disguised as a compliment. He pairs “men of science” with “poets” to collapse a modern culture war before it starts: the lab and the lyric are not rival tribes but parallel workforces enlisted in the same project. The verb choice matters. They don’t “discover” or “describe” a better world; they “create” one. That’s a deliberately active, almost political framing of intellectual life, suggesting that knowledge and art are judged not only by truth or beauty, but by what they do to the lived conditions of ordinary people.

The modesty is strategic. “More tolerable” swerves away from utopian promises and the grand rhetoric of salvation. Johnson, a Swedish novelist shaped by the century’s ideological carnage, knows what happens when writers and thinkers claim to perfect humanity. The phrase implies a battered realism: progress is incremental, hard-won, and never complete. “Sought unceasingly” adds moral pressure without sermonizing; the duty is persistence, not triumph.

The subtext is also communal. “Aided by others” punctures the myth of the solitary genius and replaces it with a chain of labor: translators, teachers, editors, technicians, readers, institutions. Johnson’s intent is to widen credit and widen responsibility. If the goal is “for everyone,” then the making of a tolerable world can’t be left to heroic individuals; it has to be a collective practice, continuously renewed against the century’s default setting of cruelty and fatigue.