Arthur C. Clarke

Quotes

• “There were, however, a few exceptions.One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sen...”
• “In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not ach...”
• “Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-calle...”
• “This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purp...”
• “Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by t...”
• “. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--o...”
• “In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. B...”
• “Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every...”
• “Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though ...”
• “Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in...”
• “In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the secon...”
• “The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank hi...”
• “Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs an...”
• “[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible exi...”
• “Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I a...”
• “Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shan...”
• “And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen th...”
• “Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come h...”
• “It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its tru...”
• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in t...”
• “Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to...”
• “Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guesse...”
• “If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says ...”
• “But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both...”
• “Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Ra...”
• “Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbo...”
• “He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship ...”
• “Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into...”
• “Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as lon...”
• “There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that...”
• “Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution wou...”
• “The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsi...”
• “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 kn...”
• “The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen ...”
• “Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did...”
• “He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contac...”
• “Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by re...”
• “Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite stagger...”
• “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.”
• “The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.”
• “Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.”
• “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
• “Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.”
• “I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.”
• “The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”
• “Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell”
• “What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.”
• “Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.”
• “But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”
• “…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…”