Bronowski Knowledge 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

Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God. — Richard Dawkins

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It's the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves. — Joseph Sobran

One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought. — Jacob Bronowski

We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny. — Jacob Bronowski

We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny — Jacob Bronowski

History belongs to the dead... Discovery belongs to the Living.

(Professor Alistair Dawkins) — Samuel L. Norman

I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood. — Ben Kingsley

that the human brain expects permanence. The cup is where you put it. The car is where you parked it (if it hasn't been towed away). The wine is still in the refrigerator where you left it. It's only people, the most complex, important, influential, life-changing elements of our lives, who are there and then are shockingly not-there. And it's surprisingly hard to get one's brain around that. So — Nick Alexander

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts. — Jacob Bronowski

I got to a point in my life when I'd done loads of things I regretted. I made all the wrong decisions. I was trying to fill my life with all these projects, hoping that one of them would succeed. I was like a cheating girlfriend. I was cheating on all the bands with other bands, and I was trying to manage everything. — Duffy

I get pretty focused when I start working on something. And I drink a lot of water, way more than most people. — Nick Woodman

The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars. — Jacob Bronowski

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding — Jacob Bronowski

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

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

You can't exceed the system with language. You can only exceed the system with events; recommended procedures that are better. You can't exceed the system by telling people to be good, be kind, be considerate ... You have to take away the conditions that makes it necessary for you to be kind. And to be kind, you design highways that aren't slippery; where no accidents, or less accidents, occur. In the future, everybody becomes an innovator - a creator. — Jacque Fresco

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find. — Jacob Bronowski

There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognise ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand says: 'This is my mark. This is man. — Jacob Bronowski

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. — Jacob Bronowski

I just left wishing that it was longer because I enjoyed it so thoroughly. — Jenny Slate

When I was four or five, my father had a general store in Winchester and I don't think the farmers could ever leave on Saturday afternoon until I had been placed up on the counter to sing. — Dinah Shore

Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law. — Thomas Sowell

In trying to formalize a rule, we look for truth, but what we find is knowledge, and what we fail to find is certainty. This limitation has no special bearing on the knowledge of self. — Jacob Bronowski

I haven't read anything but regurgitated rumors. Nothing new, and nothing true. — Layne Staley

Everything changes your life. — Melanie Tem

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. — Jacob Bronowski

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. — 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