At bottom, we have remain individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than t… - Jacob Bronowski

The fact is that there are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in the ascent of man. One is the analysis of the physical structure of the world. The other is the study of the processes of life: their delicacy, their diversity, the wavering cycles from life to death in the individual and in the species. And these traditions do not come together until the theory of evolution; because until then there is a paradox which cannot be resolved, which cannot be begun, about life.

If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science.

The great flood was the seventeenth century. That was the time of change, the hanging moment of instability in which men like Cromwell and Newton could remake the world.