It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
Interpretation
Extreme nationalism may diminish as humanity gains a broader perspective of the Earth as a small part of the universe.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote suggests that when people recognize the Earth as a tiny, interconnected part of a vast universe, it becomes harder to hold onto extreme nationalist views. This realization fosters a sense of shared humanity and encourages global unity over divisive national identities.
In practice
In a speech about global cooperation, this quote serves to highlight the importance of seeing ourselves as part of a larger community.
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'.
God is best known in not knowing him.
Nothing causes us to so nearly resemble God as the forgiveness of injuries.
In his ignorance of the whole truth, each person maintains his own arrogant point of view.
A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.
A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
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