Arthur C. Clarke famous quotes
03-28-2025
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The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The goal of the future is full unemployment
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
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.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!"
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation. If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd that people everyone would laugh him to scorn. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen,
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing. . . . The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . . Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The only real problem in life is what to do next.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
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.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Training was one thing, reality another.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
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.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
People go through four stages before any revolutionary development: 1. It's nonsense, don't waste my time. 2. It's interesting, but not important. 3. I always said it was a good idea. 4. I thought of it first.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past...
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it — for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space , and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith . They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history ; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
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