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”

  53 Copy quote

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

  Jacob Bronowski

  Creativity, Adventure, Knowledge

  27 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”

  15 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”

  23 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.

  82 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.

  26 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

  16 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

  61 Copy quote

• By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Sex, Ignorance, Race

  16 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.

  101 Copy quote

• Dissent is the mark of freedom.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Liberty, Mark, Dissent

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

  19 Copy quote

• Certainty ends inquiry.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Learning, Inquiry, Ends

  10 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

  7 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

  19 Copy quote

• Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Courage, Science, Asking Questions

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

  80 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”

  7 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

  4 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

  20 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

  11 Copy quote

• The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Writing, Science, Discovery

  "The Creative Process". Scientific American 199:59, September 1958.

  14 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.

  55 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

  5 Copy quote

• To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Mean, Intelligent, Knowing

  8 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.

  11 Copy quote

• It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Running, Simple, Law

  4 Copy quote

Page 1 of 5

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin