Arthur c. clarke quotes

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

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.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.

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.

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

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

Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: 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.

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

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.

Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.

Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.

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.

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

God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

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.

Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.

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.

I will not be afraid because I understand ... And understanding is happiness.

What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

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

I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

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?

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.

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.

Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many.

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

The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labour.

I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.

I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.

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

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.

The future is not to be forecast, but created.

If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.

No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.

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

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

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation. If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd that people everyone would laugh him to scorn. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.

Guns are the crutches of the impotent.

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.

My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.

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

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.

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.

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

Until we get rid of religion, we won't be able to conduct the search for God.

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.

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.

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.

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

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view.

The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.

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.

Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

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.

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

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!

Religion is a byproduct of fear.

It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.

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

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.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

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.

Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.

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.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

If children have interests, then education happens.

The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing.

The only real problem in life is what to do next.

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

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.

Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)

The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

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

Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one.

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

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

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.

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.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'

The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.

Now I understand,” said the last man.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

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.

Science is the only religion of mankind.

Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.