Quotes from Jacob Bronowski

The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.

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.

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 the shaper of the landscape.

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.

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.

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

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

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

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.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or 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.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

It's a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn't punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.

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

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.

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.

Certainty ends inquiry.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.