The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on a significant point in time that marks a new era in human history.
Arthur C. Clarke suggests that the turning of the millennium is not just a calendar event but a pivotal moment in humanity's progression. He implies that those who reflect on the impact of technological and cultural changes will see January 1, 2001, as the true start of a new age, highlighting the transformative power of our intellectual evolution.
In practice
This quote can be used during a New Year's Eve speech to highlight the significance of the upcoming year.
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'.
The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolatedβ¦. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.
I enjoy the simplistic training and life in marathon. You run, eat, sleep, walk around - that's how life is. You don't get complicated. The moment you get complicated it distracts your mind.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be
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