War & Peace Quote by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Hope, here, isn’t a mood; it’s a diagnosis. When Albert Szent-Gyorgyi says a “celebration” convinces him the work is “not hopeless,” he’s letting you glimpse the scientist behind the lab coat: someone who knows how easily research can curdle into futility when politics, war, or public indifference turn discovery into a dead end. The phrasing is tellingly modest. He doesn’t claim the work is triumphant or assured, only that it’s salvageable. That restraint reads like a bench scientist’s habit of mind: confidence is always provisional, earned in increments.

The key word is “teaching.” He’s not simply thanking an audience for applause; he’s crediting them with instruction. That flips the usual hierarchy where experts lecture and the public listens. In the subtext, solidarity is not charity offered to science; it’s a condition for science to matter. A toast becomes a contract.

Then the sentence widens into a grand, almost utopian sequence: “knowledge, peace, good-will and understanding.” It’s not accidental that “knowledge” leads. Szent-Gyorgyi is staking an argument that epistemology has moral consequences, that clearer seeing can discipline our worst instincts. The rhetoric is old-world humanism, but sharpened by a 20th-century awareness of what happens when knowledge is severed from ethics. He’s toasting not science as prestige, but science as a civic practice - fragile, communal, and worth defending precisely because it can fail.