Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.

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

Guns are the crutches of the impotent.

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

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

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

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!"

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

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.

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

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

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

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological

I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

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.

When one has to ask, "Am I really in love?" the answer is always "No".

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

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

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?

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

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

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

No trilogy should have more than four books.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

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

The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.

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

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