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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
Instrument
Cultural
Basic
Instruments
Evolution
Algae
Green
Ascent
Sex
Biological
Men
Invented

More quotes by 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.
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To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues it means taking pleasure in them.
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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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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.
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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 symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Jacob Bronowski
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski
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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 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.
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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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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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Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
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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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
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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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski