Science & Tech Quote by Vannevar Bush

Bush is trying to cauterize a cultural wound: the idea that science and spirit are mortal enemies. Coming from a scientist-administrator who helped midwife Big Science in America, the line reads less like a devotional aside and more like a strategic reassurance. He’s speaking to a public anxious about what scientific power had just done (and could do again) and to humanists wary of a world being rebuilt by engineers, budgets, and laboratories.

The phrasing does its work quietly. “Not to disparage” concedes the accusation before rejecting it, as if Bush knows the charge is sticky: that measurement flattens meaning. Then he pivots to “rightly,” a loaded word that smuggles ethics into the lab coat. Science is not automatically ennobling; it has to be practiced with judgment. That single adverb is the escape hatch from the era’s darker realities, an implicit admission that science pursued wrongly can just as easily furnish a scaffold.

The metaphor of “framework” is the tell. Bush doesn’t claim science generates spirit or replaces it. He makes science infrastructure: the girders under a cathedral, the stage rigging behind a drama. It’s an argument for coexistence, but also for hierarchy. Spirit “may rise” only if the material conditions are in place: health, security, knowledge, time, tools. In the postwar imagination Bush helped shape, funding science isn’t indulgence; it’s nation-building with a moral alibi. The subtext is political as much as philosophical: keep investing in research, and you’re not abandoning humanity - you’re making room for it.