Jacob Bronowski Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

Jacob Bronowski
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

Jacob Bronowski
There never was a great scientist who did not make bold guesses, and there never was a bold man whose guesses were not sometimes wild.

Jacob Bronowski
You will die but the carbon will not...[but] will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

Jacob Bronowski
Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

Jacob Bronowski
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.

Jacob Bronowski
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is a great many things... but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. It need more courage than we have ever found when we have faced our worldly problems.

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

Jacob Bronowski
The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

Jacob Bronowski
The society of scientists must be a democracy. It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the view of others, and tolerance from them.

Jacob Bronowski
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

Jacob Bronowski
Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides.

Jacob Bronowski