Science Quote by Vannevar Bush

History, Bush implies, is mostly set dressing. The curtains swap out - war to peace, scarcity to abundance, isolation to interconnectedness - but the moral engine that matters keeps running: people trying, stubbornly, to steer events toward something better. Coming from Vannevar Bush, that insistence isn’t sentimental; it’s managerial. This is a scientist-administrator who helped architect the U.S. wartime research machine and then argued, in the shadow of Hiroshima and the Cold War, that public investment in knowledge was the surest path to a stable future. When he says "scene", he’s thinking in systems: institutions, incentives, technologies, crises. When he says "aspirations", he’s pointing at the human variables that don’t neatly reduce to data but still shape outcomes.

"Men of good will" is doing careful rhetorical work. It’s an appeal to a coalition: not saints, not ideologues, but pragmatic builders who believe progress is possible and worth organizing. The subtext is a warning against cynicism and fatalism, both fashionable after catastrophic upheaval. If the world keeps resetting its plot, you can either treat that as proof nothing holds - or as proof that what holds is the ongoing project of people choosing cooperation over despair.

There’s also a quiet technocratic optimism embedded here: that continuity of purpose can outlast the chaos of events, and that decent intentions, when linked to durable institutions (labs, universities, funding), can be made to persist. In Bush’s era, that was a political argument disguised as a calm observation: keep the infrastructure of good will, because the next scene change is always coming.