Science & Tech Quote by Charles Babbage

A polite sentence with a knife behind its back: Babbage positions himself as merely the messenger while unmistakably indicting England’s intellectual priorities. The opening clause is a controlled provocation. He’s not arguing that science is underfunded in some abstract way; he’s claiming national decline, a word that carries the sting of lost prestige in a Britain obsessed with status, empire, and practical power.

The rhetorical strategy is defensive and aggressive at once. “Is not an opinion originating with me” is an early 19th-century version of preempting the quote-tweet pile-on: don’t dismiss this as one crank’s complaint. By invoking “many” and “higher authority than mine,” he’s building a coalition and, crucially, shaming the gatekeepers. If even the respectable voices are saying it, why hasn’t anything changed? The sentence also reveals the social reality of science at the time: it needed patrons, institutions, and political will, not just breakthroughs. Babbage is navigating a culture where saying the quiet part out loud could cost you access.

Context matters. Babbage wrote amid the push to professionalize science and modernize Britain’s scientific institutions; he was frustrated by complacency, amateurism, and the mismatch between Britain’s industrial might and its support for systematic research. The subtext is impatience with a nation happy to profit from ingenuity while starving the infrastructure that produces it. Even his humility is tactical: deference as leverage, courtesy as a delivery system for criticism.