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'.
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law.
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
Jane Eyre "I desired more...than was within my reach. Who blames me? Many call me discontented. I couldn't help it: the restlessness is in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
If I had even a slight awareness, and practiced the Great Way, what I would fear would be deviating from it.
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