Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.

Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered.

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.

SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.

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.

Perhaps no other year before or since 1984 has been awaited with such eager anticipation.

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.

A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.

Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.

In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.

If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.

Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time.

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.

The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

Humor was the enemy of desire.

If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labour.

I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing.

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.

Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.

If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.

The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.

Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’!

Science demands patience.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.

You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.

When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.