Jacob Bronowski QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Ascent of Man

2 " Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding "

― Jacob Bronowski

3 " 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 , The Ascent of Man

4 " Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. "

― Jacob Bronowski , Science & Human Values

5 " We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

6 " That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

7 " The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

8 " And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. "

― Jacob Bronowski

9 " Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

10 " Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

11 " It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. 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. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

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. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. "

― Jacob Bronowski

12 " Russell is reputed at a dinner party once to have said, ‘Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.’ Well, it is very easy to show this by mathematical means. But, as usual, Russell was much cleverer than this. Somebody at the dinner table said, 'Oh, come on!’ He said, 'Well, name an inconsistent proposition,’ and the man said, 'Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.’ 'All right,’ said Russell, 'what do you want me to prove?’ The man said, 'I want you to prove that you’re the pope.’ 'Why,’ said Russell, 'the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

13 " A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or a 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, and this gives him a sense at the same time of richness and of understanding. The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses. "

― Jacob Bronowski , A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy

14 " [John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

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

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

16 " Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values "

― Jacob Bronowski , Science & Human Values

17 " The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of man. "

― Jacob Bronowski

18 " Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created. "

― Jacob Bronowski , The Ascent of Man

19 " 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 , The Ascent of Man

20 " The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do; and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives. "

― Jacob Bronowski

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