Jacob Bronowski Quotes

Quotes about:

• Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Errors, Ascent, Judgment

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  51 Copy quote

• No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Power, Political, Politics

  1971 In The Listener.

  80 Copy quote

• There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Doors, Tragedy, Scientist

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  12 Copy quote

• Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Creativity, Adventure, Knowledge

  25 Copy quote

• This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Believe, Ignorance, Reality

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  19 Copy quote

• No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. ... The time has come to consider how we might bring about a separation, as complete as possible, between Science and Government in all countries. I call this the disestablishment of science, in the same sense in which the churches have been disestablished and have become independent of the state.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Country, Independent, Science

  15 Copy quote

• Dissent is the mark of freedom.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Liberty, Mark, Dissent

  "Science and Human Values". Book by Jacob Bronowski, 1956.

  16 Copy quote

• Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

  Jacob Bronowski

  Wisdom, Nature, Men

  Universities Quarterly (1956) vol. 10, no. 3, p. 252

  17 Copy quote

• It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Inspirational, Education, Teacher

  "'The Ascent of Man' ('Knowledge or Certainty')". Documentary TV Mini-Series, Episode 11, 1973.

  97 Copy quote

• Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Acceptance, Thinking, Rejection

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.100, Faber & Faber

  6 Copy quote

• The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Teamwork, Flower, People

  Face of Violence (1954) ch. 6

  9 Copy quote

• The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Men, Thinking, Air

  "The Common Sense of Science". Book by Jacob Bronowski, 1951.

  22 Copy quote

• Certainty ends inquiry.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Learning, Inquiry, Ends

  8 Copy quote

• Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Art, Unique, Men

  60 Copy quote

• We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Eye, Cutting, Hands

  Ascent of Man (1973) ch. 3

  18 Copy quote

• It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual

  Jacob Bronowski

  Mistake, Thinking, Creative

  6 Copy quote

• Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Cutting, Science, Men

  1953 'The Sense of Human Dignity', lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 19 Mar.

  9 Copy quote

• The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Powerful, Men, Skills

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  6 Copy quote

• The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Faith, Men, Thinking

  "The Ascent of Man" (Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"), 1973.

  53 Copy quote

• The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Moon, Thinking, Discovery

  4 Copy quote

• It's a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn't punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Nice, Devil, Curious

  3 Copy quote

• A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Artist, Men, Creative

  4 Copy quote

• The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, and there are no values, until men want to do both. If an anarchist wants only freedom, whatever the cost, he will prefer the jungle of man at war with man. And if a tyrant wants only social order, he will create the totalitarian state.

  Jacob Bronowski

  War, Animal, Men

  Jacob Bronowski (1975). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

  3 Copy quote

• Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Years, Analogies, World

  11 Copy quote

• The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Beauty, Art, Discovery

  4 Copy quote

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