Life & Wisdom Quote by Martin H. Fischer

Fischer’s line takes aim at the era’s favorite way of flattering science: by dressing it up in the language of commerce and competition. “Good business” and “necessity” are the respectable suits research gets forced into when funders, institutions, and the public want a tidy justification. “A gamble” and “a game” are the cynical alternatives, the versions you reach for when results don’t arrive on schedule and you start treating inquiry like roulette or sport. Fischer rejects all four metaphors because each one smuggles in a scoreboard: profit, utility, odds, winners.

Calling research “a state of mind” isn’t airy romanticism; it’s a hard boundary against instrumental thinking. The intent is to relocate the center of gravity from outcomes to orientation: curiosity disciplined into method, skepticism paired with patience, the willingness to be wrong without making wrongness a moral failure. In that frame, research isn’t validated by immediate payoff or even by certainty, but by the habits that make discovery possible.

The subtext reads like a rebuttal to an emerging 20th-century culture of managerial science, where laboratories were increasingly tied to industry, war, and institutional prestige. Fischer, writing from within a modernizing scientific world, anticipates the pressure to treat knowledge production as a pipeline. His sentence insists that the real resource isn’t funding or equipment, but a temperament: the mental posture that keeps asking better questions even when the “business case” collapses.