"One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb"
About this Quote
Suspicion disguised as a shrug: Pagnol’s line lands because it treats technological progress as a plot twist, not a triumph. The joke telescopes from the harmlessly domestic (a sewing machine, symbol of convenience and household order) to the civilization-ending (the atomic bomb) in a single breath. That speed is the point. Engineering, he implies, isn’t a neutral toolbox; it’s a slippery narrative where incremental “improvements” quietly accumulate into moral catastrophe.
As a dramatist, Pagnol understands how audiences are lulled. No one panics at a better stitch or a faster motor. The public buys the first act because it looks like comfort, productivity, maybe even liberation. By the time the third act arrives, the same logic of efficiency and mastery has been rerouted into mechanized death. The barb isn’t aimed at curiosity itself so much as at the social habit of outsourcing responsibility: if engineers “end up” at the bomb, it’s because politicians, generals, industrialists, and consumers kept applauding the ingenuity without asking what story it was building toward.
The context matters. Pagnol is speaking from a 20th-century Europe that watched modernity promise hygiene, speed, and abundance, then deliver trench warfare, total war, and nuclear terror. His wit carries a postwar chill: the brightest minds are not villains, but their work can be recruited by any regime with enough fear and funding. The line works because it punctures the comforting myth that invention is automatically progress, insisting that ethics is not an optional accessory to expertise.
As a dramatist, Pagnol understands how audiences are lulled. No one panics at a better stitch or a faster motor. The public buys the first act because it looks like comfort, productivity, maybe even liberation. By the time the third act arrives, the same logic of efficiency and mastery has been rerouted into mechanized death. The barb isn’t aimed at curiosity itself so much as at the social habit of outsourcing responsibility: if engineers “end up” at the bomb, it’s because politicians, generals, industrialists, and consumers kept applauding the ingenuity without asking what story it was building toward.
The context matters. Pagnol is speaking from a 20th-century Europe that watched modernity promise hygiene, speed, and abundance, then deliver trench warfare, total war, and nuclear terror. His wit carries a postwar chill: the brightest minds are not villains, but their work can be recruited by any regime with enough fear and funding. The line works because it punctures the comforting myth that invention is automatically progress, insisting that ethics is not an optional accessory to expertise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Engineer |
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