'It is strange to see that the spread of machines made the men who worked them conscious, first of their own work, and then of themselves as men. Yet this is what the Industrial Revolution did. It forced men in the long run to seek their destiny, and to find their station, not in the hand of God but in their own hands.'

'The machines changed the organisation of society, and shifted the centre of a man's life from his cottage home to the daily factory. In that shift, the man ceased to be a member of his family and his village, and in the long run become simply himself: a person. Because the machine in the factory changed the order in his life, it slowly changed the status of the worker who served it. It regimented and brutalized and starved him, it exploited him and (for a long time) his family, and it robbed him of everything but his skill. And yet, by these acts in the end it made him a man - a man alone.'

First Published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1944.

'In order to act in a scientific manner, in order to act in a human manner at all, two things are necessary: fact and thought. Science does not consist only of finding the facts; nor is it enough only to think, however rationally. The processes of science are characteristic of human action in that they move by the union of empirical fact and rational thought, in a way which cannot be disentangled. There is in science, as in all our lives, a continuous to and fro of actual discovery, then of thought about the implications of what we have discovered, and so back to the facts for testing and discovery - a step by step of experiment and theory, left, right, left right, for ever.'

'It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests. We have fallen into the habit of opposing the artistic to the scientific temper; we even identify them with a creative and a critical approach. In a society like ours which practices the division of labour there are of course specialized functions, as matters of convenience. As a convenience, and only as a convenience, the scientific function is different from the artistic. In the same way, the function of thought differs from, and complements, the function of feeling. But the human race is not divided into thinkers and feelers, and would not long survive the division.'

'Einstein rounded three centuries of the questioning of nature when he equated energy and mass in a single line:

This is not the same as the unification of concepts as that for which Keats was searching when he closed the Ode on a Grecian Urn with the lines

But the likeness is more important than the difference. The likeness is more helpful in making us understand that the concepts of science are like the concepts of value, monuments to our sense of unity in nature.'

First Published by Heinemann, 1951.

First Published by Cambridge University Press, 1939.

'There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is a belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become a 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 civilisation into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.'

'It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. In the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz, that is where people were turned into numbers. Into its pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.'

'A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work. But it is you, it is I, who have to know how nature works, and how (for example) electricity is one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.'

'The ascent of man is always teetering in the balance. There is always a sense of uncertainty, whether when man lifts his foot for the next step it is really going to come pointing ahead. And what is ahead for us? At last the bringing together of all that we have learned, in physics and in biology, towards an understanding of where we have come: what man is.'

First Published by BBC Publications, London, 1973.

'We cannot hope to match the total complexity of nature any more precisely than a language matches the complexity of social life. The answer to the polite enquiry "How are you?" is not a medical bulletin. And the answer to the scientific enquiry "How are atoms of carbon made?" is not a full analysis of the mind of the Almighty. There is a tolerant give and take in the reply that we make to questions about our health; and there is the same give and take, an essential intolerance, in the sentences that we can frame to picture the improbable generation of the carbon atom. A single experiment can be described in a bulletin; but the grand processes of nature cannot be sketched without the ambiguity which dogs all language. Science would come to a standstill if every ambiguity were resolved, for there would be nothing left to discover. It is this which makes it more vivid and more enlightening to call science a language for the machinery of nature and not an engineering drawing.'

First Published by Heinemann, 1965

'At the heart of our violence, in act or in feeling, lies the wish to show ourselves men with a will. Since society is an instrument for controlling our chaotic wills, the gesture of violence we make is anti-social; we invent a symbol for the forces of society, obscure and impersonal, which shall be our scapegoat. But the symbol is only a mask for the fear of each of us that society thwarts what is best and personal in him. We fear that society disregards us. In the wilderness of cities, we look for respect.'

'The slave has become extinct because he had no skill to give, and we can get his mere muscular energy from nature. The two hundred years of discovery from which the convolutions of our societies have grown have steadily increased the importance of the individual and with it his standing. But we have failed to find the forms which acknowledge this standing. This is why our world always seems to be on the edge of crisis. We have to try to fit the forms of society to what men do. I live by the skill of the bus driver and the sewer man, the chemist and the stenographer, the butcher and the mill hand; and over all these, I live by the lively minds of my readers. Here is a world in the making and moving, for which each man is a fulcrum. The difficulty is not that society must find him a worthy place; he has one. Society must find out how to recognize his place to his face.'

First Published by Turnstile Press, London, 1954.

'The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a certain hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. But it is not therefore the monopoly of the man who wrote the poem or who made the discovery. On the contrary, I believe this view of the creative act to be right because it alone gives a meaning to the act of appreciation. The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work.'

'Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them. Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not. To the layman, who is dominated by the fallacy of the comic strips, that science would all be best done by machines, the distinction is puzzling. But human search and research is a learning by steps of which none is final, and the mistakes of one generation are rungs in the ladder, no less than their correction by the next. This is why the values of science turn out to be recognizably the human values: because scientists must be men, must be fallible, and yet as men must be willing and as a society must be organized to correct their errors. William Blake said that 'to be an Error & to be Cast out is a part of God's design'. It is certainly part of the design of science.'

'The society of scientists is simple because it has a directing purpose: to explore the truth. Nevertheless, it has to solve the problem of every society, which is to find a compromise between man and men. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honour, human dignity and self-respect.'