“The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.”
As We May Think (1945)
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Vannevar Bush 57
American electrical engineer and science administrator 1890–1974Related quotes

"Remarks on the Utility of Classical Learning" (written in 1769), published in Essays, Vol. II (1776), p. 524.

Authority and the Individual (1949), p. 59
1940s

Speech to the annual dinner of the Yorkshire Society, London (8 November 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 137.
1933
[describing the historical causes of the modern tendency to make intellect the servant of alien interests]
The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

“A small man always has one weapon he can use against a great big man: he can "talk" about him.”
Country Town Sayings (1911), p298.

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Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 299

Draft of a reply to an invitation to join the Victoria Institute (1875), in Ch. 12 : Cambridge 1871 To 1879, p. 404
The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882)