Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— 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

“Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.”

— 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

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.

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. How to account for such irrational behavior? ( ... ) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“If one had to think about every footstep one took, ordinary walking would be impossible.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.
Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Religion is a byproduct of fear.

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Jealousy is a terrible thing. "It doth mock the meat it feeds upon" is an understatement. Jealousy is completely consuming, totally irrational, and absolutely debilitating. The most wonderful people in the world are nothing but raging animals when trapped in the throes of jealousy.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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.

— Arthur C. Clarke

“No on of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence-indeed, a way of life.

— Arthur C. Clarke

The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.

— Arthur C. Clarke

“During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Oh, I can think of many reasons. Perhaps it's a signal, so that any strange ship entering our universe will know where to look for life. Perhaps it marks the centre of galactic administration. Or perhaps-and somehow I feel that this is the real explanation-it's simply the greatest of all works of art. But it's foolish to speculate now. In a few hours we shall know the truth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Cassini-who discovered Japetus in 1671-also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous-merely undecided.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

I don't believe all this just happened," Nicole said. "Not on another planet. Not anywhere. Natural evolution simply does not result in the kind of interspecies harmony we have witnessed the last two days.

— Arthur C. Clarke

“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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Nicole's intuition told her not to follow the fireflies, but she said nothing.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Hal in full control of the ship. The

— Arthur C. Clarke

“For the last time, David Bowman slept.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Once, I believed that space could
have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God's
handwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Could one make up for lack of moral courage by proving physical bravery?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Now, what did "feel" really mean to a computer? Another very good question, but hardly one to be considered at that particular moment. Then,”

— Arthur C. Clarke

But in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Hello, Dave," said Hal presently. "Have you found the trouble?" This”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools.”

— 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

“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

In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind.

— Arthur C. Clarke

“We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— 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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

“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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.”

— 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

“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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Guns are the crutches of the impotent.”

— Arthur C. Clarke