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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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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Cultural
Basic
Instruments
Evolution
Algae
Green
Ascent
Sex
Biological
Men
Invented
Instrument

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 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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A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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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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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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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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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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
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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The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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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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 judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
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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All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
Jacob Bronowski
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The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
Jacob Bronowski
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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
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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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