Jacob Bronowski - The ascent of man (1973)

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

Jacob Bronowski
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
The symbol of the University is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goose girl that every student kisses at graduation. The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. 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
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 preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.

Jacob Bronowski
Stones make a wall, walls make a house, houses make streets, and streets make a city. A city is stones and a city is people; but it is not a heap of stones, and it is not a just a jostle of people.

Jacob Bronowski
A new conception was being made... that whatever fundamental units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling than we catch in the Butterfly Net of our senses.

Jacob Bronowski
There are two experiences on which our visual world is based: that gravity is vertical, and that the horizontal stands at right angles to it.

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
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
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
Every human action goes back in some part to our animal origins; we should be cold and lonely creatures if we were cut off from that blood-stream of life.

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
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
Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

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
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
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
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

Jacob Bronowski
Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that, we saw, in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower... That is the beginning of war.

Jacob Bronowski
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
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

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