Jacob Bronowski
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.Collection: Politics
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.Collection: Environmental
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.Collection: Science
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Science
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.Collection: Society
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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.
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.
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.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
Power is the by-product of understanding.
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.
The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
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. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.Collection: Errors
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Men
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.Collection: Unity
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. ... The time has come to consider how we might bring about a separation, as complete as possible, between Science and Government in all countries. I call this the disestablishment of science, in the same sense in which the churches have been disestablished and have become independent of the state.Collection: Country
Dissent is the mark of freedom.Collection: Liberty
Man masters nature not by force, but by understandingCollection: Wisdom
Certainty ends inquiry.Collection: Learning
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.Collection: Sex
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.Collection: Acceptance
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Nice
To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.Collection: Men
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Powerful
The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.Collection: Faith
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.Collection: Art
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority . . .Collection: Trying
We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.Collection: Giving
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.Collection: Fate
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.Collection: Appreciation
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.Collection: Science
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.Collection: Ascent
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.Collection: Reality
We receive experience from nature in a series of messages. From these messages we extract a content of information: that is, we decode the messages in some way. And from this code of information we then make a basic vocabulary of concepts and a basic grammar of laws, which jointly describe the inner organization that nature translates into the happenings and the appearances we meet.Collection: Nature