Science & Tech Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Modern science, Wallace warns, is not a neutral march of progress; its machinery arrives preloaded with political possibility. He frames technology as a fork in the road: the same factories and laboratories that can raise living standards can also perfect surveillance, militarize economies, and lock workers into systems that treat people as inputs. The line “used either to subjugate or liberate” is doing double duty. It reassures listeners who want faith in innovation, while quietly indicting the idea that invention automatically equals improvement.

The subtext is a rebuke to technological determinism and to the comforting myth that “science” sits above ideology. By pairing “industries, processes, and inventions,” Wallace widens the target beyond gadgets to the full apparatus of modernity: corporate organization, bureaucratic management, and mass production. Liberation isn’t just a better tool; it’s a different set of rules around ownership, labor, and distribution.

Context matters. Wallace came of age as electrification, industrial agriculture, and chemical inputs transformed American life, then watched the New Deal harness state power to stabilize capitalism - and World War II turn research into total mobilization, culminating in the atomic bomb. As vice president (1941–45), he was close enough to see how quickly “innovation” becomes an arms race and how propaganda can dress coercion up as necessity.

“The choice is up to us” lands as both democratic appeal and moral ultimatum. Wallace isn’t romanticizing the public; he’s assigning responsibility. If modern science becomes a tool of domination, it won’t be because the future “happened.” It will be because institutions - and voters - permitted it.