Jacob Bronowski Quotes

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

The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

Jacob Bronowski

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. The personal commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one has made the Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.

Jacob Bronowski

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