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. – 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. – Jacob Bronowski
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. – Jacob Bronowski
Who has not hoped
To outrage an enemys dignity?
Who has not been swept
By the wish to hurt?
And who has not thought that the impersonal world
Deserves no better than to be destroyed
By one fabulous sign of his displeasure? – Jacob Bronowski
In fairyland we avoid the word “law”; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it…. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. – G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy