Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

218 Sourced Quotes

Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.

Arthur C. Clarke
Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.

Arthur C. Clarke
The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—

Arthur C. Clarke
It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'—however well attested—until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

Arthur C. Clarke
Jesearc sat motionless within a whirlpool of numbers.... He was fascinated by the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, apparently according to no laws, across the spectrum of integers.

Arthur C. Clarke
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.

Arthur C. Clarke
In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

Arthur C. Clarke
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.

Arthur C. Clarke
The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.

Arthur C. Clarke
There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come.

Arthur C. Clarke
There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.

Arthur C. Clarke
The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

Arthur C. Clarke
The Solar System is rather a large place, though whether it will be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens remains to be seen.

Arthur C. Clarke
Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor … Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done — and was about to do.

Arthur C. Clarke
But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

Arthur C. Clarke
Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.

Arthur C. Clarke
Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them.

Arthur C. Clarke
We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints.

Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time.

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 non-existence of Zeus or Thor — but they have few followers now.

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
The universes... drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.

Arthur C. Clarke
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
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.

Arthur C. Clarke
We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.

Arthur C. Clarke