Daily Inspiration Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s jab lands because it borrows a classic con: “selling the Brooklyn Bridge.” By flipping it - scientists not only build the bridge but then “buy” it - he paints expertise as a kind of elegant self-swindle: brilliant construction paired with gullible faith in one’s own sales pitch. It’s not an argument about equations; it’s a culture-war caricature about temperament. The scientist, in Buckley’s telling, is both engineer and mark, intoxicated by the internal logic of his models and the institutional prestige that certifies them.

The subtext is distrust of technocracy. Buckley came up in the mid-century moment when “the experts” were ascendant: Cold War systems analysis, government-funded research, big universities, social science pretending to manage society like a machine. To a conservative polemicist wary of centralized planning, that ecosystem can look like a closed loop: scientists build grand structures of theory, then treat those structures as reality itself, purchasing their own conclusions with public money and public authority.

It’s also a rhetorical squeeze play. “Scientists” here is shorthand for a broader class of credentialed elites - not just physicists but economists, policy analysts, the whole managerial priesthood. The insult works because it concedes competence (“build”) while attacking judgment (“buy”). You can be capable enough to reshape the world, Buckley implies, and still be naïve about the human incentives, politics, and moral tradeoffs your bridge is meant to carry.