Bronowski Ascent Quotes & Sayings

The Principle of Uncertainty fixed once for all the realisation that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty. — Jacob Bronowski

That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution
not biological, but cultural evolution ... The Ascent of Man. — Jacob Bronowski

His [Pitt's] successor as prime minister was Mr. Addington, who was a friend of Mr. Pitt, just as Mr. Pitt was a friend of Mr. Addington; but their respective friends were each other's enemies. Mr. Fox, who was Mr. Pitt's enemy (although many of his friends were Mr. Pitt's friends), had always stood uncompromisingly for peace with France and held dangerously liberal opinions; nevertheless, in 1804, Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt got together to overthrow Mr. Pitt's friend Mr. Addington, who was pushing the war effort with insufficient vigor. — J. Christopher Herold

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. — Jacob Bronowski

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. — Jacob Bronowski

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

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

My word is law on this island. She is the woman I love. So shall her words also be law upon The Shade ... unless I say otherwise. — Bella Forrest

Do not be downhearted because of scandals in the Church. Jesus Himself warned that scandals would come, and that the wicked would be judged and punished. We should rest in His promise. We should rest in His one true Church, even if within the Church we find much unrest. — Scott Hahn

It's really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There's a whole commotion going on inside us. — Jerry Spinelli

I'm not where I'm supposed to be,
I'm not what I want to be,
But I'm not what I used to be.
I haven't learned how to arrive;
I've just learned how to keep going — John C. Maxwell

Yet, the principle of uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of tolerance. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge, all information, between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance, and that's whether it's in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of though that aspires to dogma. — Jacob Bronowski

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks. — Paul C. Nagel

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. — Jacob Bronowski

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. — Mikko Hypponen

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. — Jacob Bronowski