Jacob Bronowski

Power is the by-product of understanding.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

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.

The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.