Science & Tech Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein lands the sentence like a gavel: a whole century indicted, another acquitted, and the real defendant is faith itself. It works because it sounds like common sense while smuggling a provocation. “Believed in science” doesn’t mean the 1800s had better labs; it means science functioned as a moral technology, a story about progress that could replace older certainties. The nineteenth century could be brutal, unequal, and imperial, yet still narrate its brutality as “advancement.” Belief, here, is the key word: science as creed.

By the time Stein is writing, the twentieth century has watched that creed curdle. Two world wars, mechanized slaughter, poison gas, eugenics, assembly-line death: science didn’t just fail to save modernity, it helped modernity perfect its worst impulses. The sentence is a diagnosis of disillusionment, but also a sly critique of sophistication. The twentieth century still uses science obsessively; it simply refuses to grant it innocence. What changes is not the presence of technology, but the collapse of the idea that knowledge automatically equals virtue.

Stein’s modernism matters to the subtext. Modernism is what art looks like when linear progress stops feeling honest. Her clipped, declarative style mirrors the cultural break she’s describing: no comforting narrative arc, just an abrupt before-and-after. The line is less nostalgia than warning: when “belief in science” dies, something else rushes in to organize meaning - ideology, nationalism, mysticism, consumer myth. Stein isn’t romanticizing the nineteenth century; she’s naming the vacancy the twentieth century has to live with.