"A wonderful threshold of knowledge"

Rereading Bronowski (1973):

...Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind...

Civilisations fail when they limit the freedom of imagination of the young...

It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that man and beliefs and science will perish altogether...

We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power...

We are on a wonderful threshold of knowledge. The ascent of many 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 down 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...

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures...

We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of art and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us...

We are all afraid – for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the imagination...