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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.

Jacob Bronowski

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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Evil
Injustice
Illuminations
Means
Survive
Sharpness
Ends
Deeper
Outline
Light
Rules
Illumination
Mean
Whose
Outlines
Good
Seen
Unjust
Justice
Fearful
Values
Conduct

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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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
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The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
Jacob Bronowski
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The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
Jacob Bronowski
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Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
Jacob Bronowski
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Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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We gain our ends only with the laws of nature we control her only by understanding her laws.
Jacob Bronowski
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The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob Bronowski