Science Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Kusch is doing something slyly disarming: a senior scientist, credentialed by the very institutions that usually lecture the young about “earning your place,” flips the hierarchy and hands the steering wheel to the next generation. The line isn’t just encouragement; it’s a strategic transfer of agency. By saying “the destiny of our society is yours to make,” he rejects the comforting fiction that history is driven mainly by great men, expert committees, or laboratory breakthroughs. He’s telling students and younger citizens that the future won’t be decided in the margins of journals, but in the choices that determine what science gets built, funded, regulated, and morally tolerated.

The second clause sharpens the provocation. “You have a vastly greater importance to the world than we do” sounds humble, but it carries an implicit indictment of professional self-importance. Kusch is reminding his peers that technical mastery doesn’t equal civic authority, and that the public consequences of knowledge outstrip the prestige of producing it. Coming from a mid-20th-century physicist, this lands in the shadow of the era when physics proved it could rearrange geopolitics overnight: nuclear weapons, Cold War research pipelines, the marriage of academia and the security state. In that context, the quote reads like an ethical corrective.

The subtext is almost parental, but unsentimental: if you inherit a society shaped by our discoveries, you also inherit responsibility for what those discoveries become. It’s both a compliment and a warning, delivered with the quiet urgency of someone who’s seen how quickly “progress” can outrun wisdom.