I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the vastness of the universe and the anticipation of extraterrestrial contact.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke expresses a sense of wonder about the Milky Way galaxy, contemplating the possibility of extraterrestrial life coming from its myriad stars. He likens the search for these life forms to setting off a fire alarm, signifying that he believes significant contact or revelation is imminent, evoking both excitement and a sense of urgency regarding humanity's place in the cosmos.
In practice
In a science class discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.
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 goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.
I'll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.
You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.
The faster you go, the shorter you are.
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