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.
Interpretation
Science without strong moral principles leads to destruction.
Arthur C. Clarke emphasizes the interdependence of science and ethics, arguing that advancements in scientific knowledge must be coupled with a solid moral framework. When a society separates its scientific pursuits from ethical considerations, the results can be detrimental and ultimately self-sabotaging, leading both progress and morality to decline.
In practice
In a discussion about the responsibilities of scientists at a conference.
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.
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'.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
There was a time when 'universe' meant 'all there is.' Everything. The whole shebang. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms.
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
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