Quotes from Jacob Bronowski

Progress is the exploration of our own error.

It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. 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.

The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the depth of his being.

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

The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do.

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

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.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.

You will die but the carbon will not its career does not end with you. It 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.

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.

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.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.

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.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

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 know, but to question it.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

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

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.

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

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime." Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values