Top 100 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
#1. The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
#2. It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a living entity, localised in a single spot, though actually it was the sum total of all the machines in Diaspar.
Arthur C. Clarke
#3. 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 ...
Arthur C. Clarke
#4. There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.
Arthur C. Clarke
#5. Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
Arthur C. Clarke
#6. And as for the Council - tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.' The
Arthur C. Clarke
#9. Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.
Arthur C. Clarke
#10. Beyond gravity, some of that freedom was regained; with the loss of weight went many of the cares and worries of Earth. Heywood
Arthur C. Clarke
#11. As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.
Arthur C. Clarke
#12. Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air, and other expendables. But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates - on a slightly larger scale.
Arthur C. Clarke
#13. The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Arthur C. Clarke
#14. Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.
Arthur C. Clarke
#15. Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation.
Arthur C. Clarke
#16. My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.
[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]
Arthur C. Clarke
#18. Ten kilometers away, the lights of New York glowed on the skyline like a dawn frozen in the act of breaking.
Arthur C. Clarke
#21. Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don't age so quickly - they'll live longer than we do. Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the unusually delicate bone structure.
Arthur C. Clarke
#22. (One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn's, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.)
Arthur C. Clarke
#23. Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
Arthur C. Clarke
#24. The newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
Arthur C. Clarke
#25. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
#26. But in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as
Arthur C. Clarke
#27. like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
Arthur C. Clarke
#29. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Arthur C. Clarke
#30. Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
Arthur C. Clarke
#31. Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact.
Arthur C. Clarke
#32. 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]
Arthur C. Clarke
#33. Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills.
Arthur C. Clarke
#34. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
#35. Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism
Arthur C. Clarke
#36. The recipe for a long, happy life:
consult with old philosophers and young doctors,
consort with old friends and young women.
Arthur C. Clarke
#37. an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: "Wormholes in space.
Arthur C. Clarke
#38. In Brohier's eyes, violence was not merely the last refuge of the incompetent. It was the gloating revenge of the sore loser.
Arthur C. Clarke
#39. He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
#40. A gentle tickling on Floyd's wrist announced an incoming call.
Arthur C. Clarke
#41. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
#42. 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
#43. Apart from this common Lassan tendency to procrastinate, Kumar's chief defects were an adventurous nature and a fondness for sometimes risky practical jokes. This,
Arthur C. Clarke
#44. Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous - merely undecided.
Arthur C. Clarke
#45. All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
Arthur C. Clarke
#46. Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered.
Arthur C. Clarke
#47. The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.
Arthur C. Clarke
#48. I will not be afraid because I understand ... And understanding is happiness.
Arthur C. Clarke
#49. No one worried except a few philosophers. The race was too intent upon savoring its new-found freedom to look beyond the pleasures of the present. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias - boredom. Perhaps
Arthur C. Clarke
#50. Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.
Arthur C. Clarke
#51. 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
#52. Yet if there were no hazards there would be no achievement, no sense of adventure.
Arthur C. Clarke
#53. he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout
Arthur C. Clarke
#54. Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.
Arthur C. Clarke
#55. Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Arthur C. Clarke
#56. who is better off, the child with a mentor who knows and tells everything or the one whose teacher helps the child find her own answers?
Arthur C. Clarke
#58. Hello, Dave," said Hal presently. "Have you found the trouble?" This
Arthur C. Clarke
#59. Nevertheless, when you did not know what you were looking for, it was important to avoid all prejudices and preconceptions; something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.
Arthur C. Clarke
#61. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
#62. Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.
Arthur C. Clarke
#63. Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Arthur C. Clarke
#64. He was alone in an airless, partially disabled ship, all communication with Earth cut off. There was not another human being within half a billion miles. And yet, in one very real sense, he was not alone. Before he could be safe, he must be lonelier still.
Arthur C. Clarke
#65. Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.
Arthur C. Clarke
#66. The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial.
Arthur C. Clarke
#68. Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.
Arthur C. Clarke
#69. A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled - and this did nothing at all to help - a phrase he had once come across: Someone is walking over your grave.
Arthur C. Clarke
#70. Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
Arthur C. Clarke
#71. Do you believe in ghosts, Dim?" "Certainly not: but like every sensible man, I'm afraid of them. Why do you ask?
Arthur C. Clarke
#72. It is vital to remember that information
in the sense of raw data
is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
Arthur C. Clarke
#73. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered;
Arthur C. Clarke
#74. At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.
Arthur C. Clarke
#75. Ladies and gentlemen, those flames from the port engines are perfectly normal. The stewardess will be coming around in a moment to serve coffee, tea, or milk. I'm sorry we don't have anything stronger on this flight - regulations don't permit it.
Arthur C. Clarke
#76. Could one make up for lack of moral courage by proving physical bravery?
Arthur C. Clarke
#77. Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.
Arthur C. Clarke
#78. The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.
Arthur C. Clarke
#81. 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
#82. The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.
Arthur C. Clarke
#83. They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999 - but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
Arthur C. Clarke
#85. Evolution and science had come to the same answers; and the work of Nature had lasted longer. At
Arthur C. Clarke
#86. And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
Arthur C. Clarke
#87. The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
#88. For there was no vessel - at least of Man's making - anywhere between her and the infinitely distant stars.
Arthur C. Clarke
#89. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
#91. There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.
Arthur C. Clarke
#93. The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications ...
Arthur C. Clarke
#94. The Dean's complaining to his Faculty. Why do you scientists need such expensive equipment? Why can't you be like the Math Department, which only needs a blackboard and a wastepaper basket? Better still, like the Department of Philosophy. That doesn't even need a wastepaper basket ...
Arthur C. Clarke
#95. He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke
#96. 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
#97. He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it.
Arthur C. Clarke
#99. 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.
Arthur C. Clarke
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