Time & Perspective Quote by Jean Rostand

Rostand’s line lands with the cool sting of a scientist watching “progress” sprint ahead of judgment. It’s not nostalgia for horse-and-buggy morals; it’s an alarm about the mismatch between what humans can do and what they’re ready to take responsibility for. The phrasing is surgical: “certain moments” narrows the claim to crisis points, when the future stops feeling like opportunity and starts looking like a lab accident. And “might wish” keeps it hypothetical, a restrained admission that the desire itself is suspect.

The provocation sits in that final pivot: “built by men of the past.” Rostand isn’t canonizing earlier generations so much as invoking them as a missing constraint. “Men of the past” reads as a stand-in for slower tempos, thicker social friction, and a greater sense that actions had visible consequences. Modernity, by contrast, gives us tools that are abstract, scalable, and hard to un-invent. When you can change life at the cellular level, or annihilate cities at the push of a button, the old virtues of hesitation and limits stop looking quaint and start looking like guardrails.

Context matters: Rostand lived through two world wars, the rise of industrialized killing, and the early decades of genetics and bioethics debates. For a biologist-philosopher, the nightmare isn’t science itself; it’s science yoked to ambition, nationalism, or market incentives. The subtext is a grim compliment to earlier eras: they lacked our power, and that ignorance sometimes doubled as safety.