Jacob Bronowski - Knowledge Quotes

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

Jacob Bronowski
And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

Jacob Bronowski
Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Jacob Bronowski
Knowledge makes prodigious journeys, and what seems to us a leap in time often turns out t be a long progression from place to place, from one city to another.

Jacob Bronowski
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.

Jacob Bronowski
The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.

Jacob Bronowski
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.

Jacob Bronowski