It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that destruction occurs from a lack of understanding or appreciation for something.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote points to the notion that those who lack the ability or willingness to comprehend the complexity and value of something often resort to destruction as a response. This speaks to a broader commentary on the importance of understanding and empathy in human interactions and the dangers of ignorance.
In practice
In a debate about cultural preservation, this quote can highlight the consequences of ignorance.
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.
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
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them... and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it's for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody - for being a stereotype.
When I sleep I turn into a wolf. Bran turned his face away and looked back out into the night. Do wolves dreams?
A riot is the language of the unheard. On blacks in America; address at Birmingham AL
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.
Be not too presumptuously sure in any business; for things of this world depend on such a train of unseen chances that if it were in man's hands to set the tables, still he would not be certain to win the game.
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