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.
Interpretation
Science without strong moral principles leads to destruction.
Arthur C. Clarke emphasizes the interdependence of science and ethics, arguing that advancements in scientific knowledge must be coupled with a solid moral framework. When a society separates its scientific pursuits from ethical considerations, the results can be detrimental and ultimately self-sabotaging, leading both progress and morality to decline.
In practice
In a discussion about the responsibilities of scientists at a conference.
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.
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'.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment.
Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.
These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
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