It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Interpretation
Intelligence may not necessarily contribute to survival.
This quote by Arthur C. Clarke suggests that while intelligence is often revered as a valuable trait, it has not been definitively shown to ensure survival. The statement provokes thought about the nature of intelligence in relation to basic instincts and existence, challenging the notion that cleverness alone is what sustains life in the natural world.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of intelligence in evolution.
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.
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
I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.
[I]t seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.
I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.
Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.
I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced. Were it possible for a man always to sorrow and yet to be pure, I would choose the sorrow if I might win the purity, for to be free from the power of sin, to be made to love holiness, is true happiness.
Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
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