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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

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
Power
Central
Opposition
Magic
Knowledge
Science

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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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.
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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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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.
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Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
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The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We gain our ends only with the laws of nature we control her only by understanding her laws.
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The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
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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.
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Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.
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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.
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Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
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Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
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It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.
Jacob Bronowski
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It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.
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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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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