J.D. Bernal > Quotes

“Knowledge that is not being used for winning of further knowledge does not even remain- it decays and disappears.”
― J D Bernal, Science in History - Volume 3: The Natural Sciences in Our Time

“We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.”
― J.D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul

“There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.”
― J.D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul

“She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics.

{Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin}”
― J.D. Bernal

“Man is occupied and has been persistently occupied since his separate evolution, with three kinds of struggle: first with the massive, unintelligent forces of nature, heat and cold, winds, rivers, matter and energy; secondly, with the things closer to him, animals and plants, his own body, its health and disease; and lastly, with his desires and fears, his imaginations and stupidities.”
― J. D. Bernal

“In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.”
― J.D. Bernal, The extension of man: A history of physics before 1900

“technique is an individually acquired and socially secured way of doing something; a science is a way of understanding how to do it in order to do it better.”
― J.D. Bernal, Science in History: Volume 1: The Emergence of Science

“Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.”
― J.D. Bernal

“Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.”
― J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science

“Already enough is known to show that the whole concept of the superiority of Western Christian civilization is one based on an arrogant ignorance of the rest of the world.”
― J.D. Bernal, Science in History: Volume 1: The Emergence of Science

“The danger now is that anti-intellectualism [...] is spreading all over the areas of so-called "Western civilisation". It can take many forms, from aggressive clericalism and atom-bomb militarism to the mild but dangerous pessimisms of Kierkegaard and Satre. All these forms have something in common. They all express the belief that man's state cannot be improved by conscious intelligent co-operation. They want less knowledge and more faith and are unanimous in attacking countries where men are trying to build up a scientific civilisation through their own efforts, and in belittling the beliefs which are leading them to do so - the philosophic system of dialectical materialism.”
― J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science

“In its endeavour, science is communism.

In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact.”
― J.D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science

“Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”
― John Desmond Bernal

“Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human action. The task which the scientists have undertaken — the understanding and control of nature and of man himself — is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society.”
― J.D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science

“Every chemical compound, according to Engels, comes into existence only at a certain time in the development of the universe when the conditions are appropriate for it; and when it does come into existence it manifests this by entering into its characteristic relations. Neither carbon compounds or proteins are ideal forms, but are themselves witnesses of the conditions on a cooling planet. It is here that occurs his celebrated remark that life is the mode of existence of proteins.”
― J.D. Bernal, Marx and Science