It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Interpretation
Intelligence may not necessarily contribute to survival.
This quote by Arthur C. Clarke suggests that while intelligence is often revered as a valuable trait, it has not been definitively shown to ensure survival. The statement provokes thought about the nature of intelligence in relation to basic instincts and existence, challenging the notion that cleverness alone is what sustains life in the natural world.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of intelligence in evolution.
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.
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
We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
When the Guest is being searched for,_x000D_ it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work._x000D_ Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
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