Arthur C. Clarke quotes:

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  • The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

  • I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

  • The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

  • Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

  • In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

  • I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.

  • Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  • Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

  • Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

  • It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.

  • How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

  • A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

  • I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

  • The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

  • Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.

  • Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

  • No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

  • Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?

  • 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?

  • 1. 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. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  • They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.

  • Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.

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

  • 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.

  • And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.

  • Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect."

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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."

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.

  • 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.

  • Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

  • Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. 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.

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

  • The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

  • I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

  • 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.

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

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

  • There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

  • 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.

  • Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

  • The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

  • The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

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

  • Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

  • 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!"

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • The only real problem in life is what to do next.

  • Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

  • 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.

  • ...science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could.

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

  • As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

  • But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.

  • 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.

  • I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

  • 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.

  • After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.

  • He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

  • Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

  • They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

  • My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

  • Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.

  • In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.

  • But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

  • It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings.Alan Bishop

  • . . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

  • 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.

  • The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

  • It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

  • There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

  • The goal of the future is full unemployment

  • 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.

  • Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

  • No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

  • The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

  • 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.

  • The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.

  • We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ...

  • Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)

  • One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

  • Until we get rid of religion, we won't be able to conduct the search for God.

  • What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view.

  • The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

  • You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.

  • Science is the only religion of mankind.

  • God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist.

  • I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  • Religion is a byproduct of fear,

  • 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.

  • Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough.

  • Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.

  • Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable.

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