Politics & Power Quote by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s line is a quiet takedown delivered in the cool voice of a man who trusted physics more than politics. He’s not arguing against national identity so much as wagering that nationalism’s most feverish variants depend on a kind of visual and cognitive tunnel vision. Give people the “true perspective” of Earth - not as a map of borders but as a fragile sphere suspended in black space - and the story nations tell about themselves starts to sound parochial, even childish.

The sentence is engineered to feel inevitable: “not easy to see how” doesn’t preach; it invites the reader to do the math. “Extreme forms of nationalism” is clinical phrasing, like a diagnosis, implying the problem isn’t pride or culture but a radicalized attachment to lines on paper. Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “when men have seen.” Clarke is betting on experience as an antidote. This is classic mid-century techno-humanism: the belief that new vantage points (rockets, satellites, photographs) don’t just expand capability, they expand conscience.

Context matters. Clarke wrote from the long shadow of World War II and the early Cold War, when nationalism had already shown its murderous potential and nuclear weapons made “us versus them” an extinction-level hobby. The subtext is that spaceflight isn’t merely exploration; it’s therapy. Still, the phrasing carries an unspoken hope - maybe even a naivete - that seeing the planet from above will melt tribal loyalties. History has been messier. But the quote works because it captures a genuine psychological trick: scale can puncture certainty, and awe can short-circuit ideology, at least for a moment.