Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.
Interpretation
Change can be beautiful and significant, even if it seems overwhelming.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke suggests that while gigantic changes or concepts may initially seem intimidating or daunting, they can ultimately reveal beauty and wonder. The mention of grandchildren hints at the evolution of perspectives across generations, implying that what might seem massive and overwhelming can also bring joy and admiration when viewed from a different angle.
In practice
A speaker at a family reunion might reference this quote while discussing how new technologies are transforming family interactions.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
I think all cats are wild. They only act tame if there´s a saucer of milk in it for them.
When a person’s tongue is extensively wrong, it is absurd, no less than unscriptural, to say that their heart is right.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone
On the one hand, faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him, and enter into communion with Him.
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.
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