Jacob Bronowski - Man Quotes

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Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.

Jacob Bronowski
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
Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.

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

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

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
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.

Jacob Bronowski
Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it.

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
Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.

Jacob Bronowski
There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Jacob Bronowski
I find both a special pleasure and constraint in describing the progress of mathematics, because it has been part of so much speculation: a ladder for mystical as well as rational thought in the intellectual ascent of man.

Jacob Bronowski
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

Jacob Bronowski
That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution... "The Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski
Every civilization has been grounded on technology: what makes ours unique is that for the first time we believe that every man is entitled to all its benefits.

Jacob Bronowski
These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.

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
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
Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

Jacob Bronowski
In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man.

Jacob Bronowski
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.

Jacob Bronowski
We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski
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
Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.

Jacob Bronowski
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 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
Positivists and analysts alike believe that the words is and ought belong to different worlds, so that sentences which are constructed with is usually have verifiable meaning, but sentences constructed with ought never have. This is because Ludwig Wittgenstein's unit, and Bertrand Russell's unit, is one man; all British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man's, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.

Jacob Bronowski
Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference, it must be based on respect. Respect as a personal value implies, in any society, the public acknowledgements of justice and of due honor. These are values which to the layman seem most remote from any abstract study. Justice, honor, the respect of man for man: What, he asks, have these human values to do with science? [...]
Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.

Jacob Bronowski