Top 80 Jacob Bronowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.”

— Jacob Bronowski

52. “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

53. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

54. “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

55. “Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.”

— Jacob Bronowski

56. “Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.”

— Jacob Bronowski

57. “In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.”

— Jacob Bronowski

58. “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

59. “To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.”

— Jacob Bronowski

60. “Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

— Jacob Bronowski

61. “Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.”

— Jacob Bronowski

62. “The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.”

— Jacob Bronowski

63. “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

64. “The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.”

— Jacob Bronowski

65. “That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”

— Jacob Bronowski

66. “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

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

— Jacob Bronowski

68. “Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.”

— Jacob Bronowski

69. “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. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.”

— Jacob Bronowski

70. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

71. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

72. “There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.”

— Jacob Bronowski

73. “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

74. “Progress is the exploration of our own error.”

— Jacob Bronowski

75. “Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker’s.”

— Jacob Bronowski

76. “A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.”

— Jacob Bronowski

77. “Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.”

— Jacob Bronowski

78. “The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.”

— Jacob Bronowski

79. “The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.”

— Jacob Bronowski

80. “Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.”

— Jacob Bronowski

81. “Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values.”

— Jacob Bronowski

82. “The brain cannot reach its inner conclusions by any logic of certainty. In place of this, the brain must do two things. It must be content to accept less than certain knowledge. And it must have statistical methods which are different in kind from ours, by which it reaches its acceptable level of uncertainty. By these means, the brain constructs a picture of the world which is less than certain yet highly interlocked in its parts.”

— Jacob Bronowski

83. “We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.”

— Jacob Bronowski

84. “There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill.”

— Jacob Bronowski

85. “You cannot love the girl without being conscious of the fact that she has yellow hair, you cannot see the world without the intervention of the physical senses.”

— Jacob Bronowski

86. “We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols in it. And all the difficult paradoxes which go right back to Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.”

— Jacob Bronowski

87. “The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.”

— Jacob Bronowski