Arthur C. Clarke - Earth Quotes

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

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
Plans for the final assault on Big Brother had already been worked out and agreed upon with Mission Control. Leonov would move in slowly, probing at all frequencies, and with steadily increasing power — constantly reporting back to Earth at every moment. When final contact was made, they would try to secure samples by drilling or laser spectroscopy; no one really expected these endeavours to succeed, as even after a decade of study TMA-1 resisted all attempts to analyse its material. The best efforts of human scientists in this direction seemed comparable to those of Stone Age men trying to break through the armour of a bank vault with flint axes.

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
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
When you are next out of doors on a summer night, turn your head towards the zenith. Almost vertically above you will be shining the brightest star of the northern skies — Vega of the Lyre, twenty-six years away at the speed of light, near enough to the point of no return for us short-lived creatures. Past this blue-white beacon, fifty times as brilliant as our sun, we may send our minds and bodies, but never our hearts.
For no man will ever turn homewards beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.

Arthur C. Clarke
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.

Arthur C. Clarke
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.

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
Through all the ages, man has fought against two great enemies — time and space. Time he may never wholly conquer, and the sheer immensity of space may also defeat him when he has ventured more than a few light-years from the Sun. Yet on this little Earth, at least, he may one day claim a final victory.

Arthur C. Clarke
The signal vanished for agonizing seconds, then came back much clearer, though not appreciably louder... relay this information to Earth". Using my suit radio - no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: "THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA..."

Arthur C. Clarke
Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion.... Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space.

Arthur C. Clarke
If ships from Earth ever set out to conquer other worlds they may find themselves, at the end of their journeys, in the position of painted war-canoes drawing slowly into New York Harbor.

Arthur C. Clarke
There are more suns in the whole of space than there are grains of sand on all the shores of Earth; and on any one of those grains, there may be civilizations that will make us look like primitive, ignorant savages.

Arthur C. Clarke
The sea which beats against the coasts of Earth, which seems so endless and so eternal, is as the drop of water on the slide of a microscope compared with the shoreless sea of space.

Arthur C. Clarke
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.

Arthur C. Clarke