The Ascent of Man Quotes

“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, The Ascent of Man

“There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“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, The Ascent of Man

“Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“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, The Ascent of Man

“That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“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, The Ascent Of Man

“what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“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, The Ascent Of Man

“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, The Ascent Of Man

“I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into–into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions … into extrasensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“we must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“يترك كل حيوان من الأثار ما يدل على مكانه , اما الانسان فيترك اثار ما ابدعه”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“My view is that diversity is the breath of life, and we must not abandon that for any single form which happens to catch our fancy – even our genetic fancy. Cloning is the stabilisation of one form, and that runs against the whole current of creation – of human creation above all. Evolution is founded in variety and creates diversity; and of all animals, man is most creative because he carries and expresses the largest store of variety. Every attempt to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally, or intellectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that has made man its apex. Yet”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book…”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and Eastern Europe when it first appeared. That is because there is a difference of scale which I can only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them. I believe that the importance of the horse in European history has always been underrated. In a sense, warfare was created by the horse, as a nomad activity. That is what the Huns brought, that is what the Phrygians brought, that is what finally the Mongols brought, and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later. In particular, the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle. They conceived a different strategy of war – a strategy that is like a war game; how, warmakers love to play games!”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten-thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“Charles Darwin”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“W. B. Yeats”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

“It has a special biological character. Let us take one simple, down-to-earth criterion for that: we are the only species in which the female has orgasms. That is remarkable, but it is so. It is a mark of the fact that in general there is much less difference between men and women (in the biological sense and in sexual behaviour) than there is in other species. That may seem a strange thing to say. But to the gorilla and the chimpanzee, where there are enormous differences between male and female, it would be obvious. In the language of biology, sexual dimorphism is small in the human species. So”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man