Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is calling out the mind’s favorite magic trick: it draws a line in the sand, then insists the ocean put it there. Coming from a physicist who spent his career resisting tidy separations - between observer and observed, matter and meaning, science and philosophy - the line lands as both diagnosis and warning. The intent isn’t to dunk on thinking; it’s to expose a particular kind of thought: the reflex that turns fluid processes into solid categories, then forgets it did the freezing.

The subtext is epistemic humility with teeth. “Divisions” aren’t just intellectual labels; they become social facts. Once we treat our conceptual cuts as “natural,” we stop seeing them as choices and start policing them as reality. That’s how “us/them” hardens into identity, how “objective” pretends it has no author, how disciplinary boundaries become career fortresses. Bohm’s phrasing indicts a subtle self-deception: thought manufactures a map and then confuses it for the territory, congratulating itself for discovering what it actually invented.

Context matters: Bohm’s broader work on wholeness and the implicate order argues that reality is fundamentally interconnected, while fragmentation is largely a cognitive artifact. Read against Cold War ideology, academic siloing, and the rise of technocratic certainty, the quote becomes a critique of modernity’s confidence. It works because it turns thought back on itself. The sentence performs the trap it describes: you can feel the mind wanting to classify “divisions” as either real or unreal, when Bohm is pointing to the more uncomfortable claim - that the act of dividing is itself the real event, and it carries consequences.