"Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. 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 10,000 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. The evidence for that, we saw, in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower... That is the beginning of war."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United KingdomMathematicians from PolandHistorians of scienceMathematicians from the United KingdomBiologists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Episode 2: "The Harvest of the Seasons"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (January 18, 1908 – August 22, 1974) was a British mathematician, biologist, and science historian of Polish origin. He is remembered as the writer and presenter of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man.
111 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jacob Bronowski →
Related Quotes
"Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge."
"We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and …"
"These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoug…"
"The air in a man's lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breat…"
"I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two lang…"
"The most modest research worker at his bench, pushing a probe into a neuron to measure the electric response when a l…"
"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike…"
"It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible…"
"The sneer that science is only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineti…"
"Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history."