Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the vast number of deceased individuals compared to those currently living, suggesting a collective presence of history.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote emphasizes the idea that for every person alive today, there are many who have lived before them, underscoring the weight of history and the generations that have come before us. It invites reflection on the legacy, wisdom, and experiences of those who have passed, reminding us that each living person is a product of their ancestors and the society shaped by them.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of historical awareness, one might say this quote to emphasize our connection to the past.
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'.
We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive.
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
Don't you know that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?
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