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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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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Week
Head
Massacre
Give
Massacres
Enough
Motives
Giving
Motive
Make
Shot
Shots
Violence

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
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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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob Bronowski
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The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring .
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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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
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Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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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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Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
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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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.
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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Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
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The world today is made, it is powered by science and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
Jacob Bronowski
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To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
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