Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

Training was one thing, reality another.

The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.

Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?

We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.

Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive.

Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.

A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.

Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.

The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.

Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.

Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.

Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.

Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.

The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.

I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.

The success of a science fiction writer is if he can write a good read.

Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.

Don't mess up the environment until you're quite sure what you're doing.

I'm quite fond of the writer who told a beginning author, "If you've got a message, use Western Union."

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.

My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelli

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth, " when it is clearly "Ocean.

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.

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell

…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…

This is only a work of fiction, The Truth as always will be far stranger

Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.

[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.

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 towards new ends.

..the happy hum of humanity.

Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shandwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme....

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.

Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.