219 Quotes by Science Fiction Futurist Arthur C. Clarke

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

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

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence.

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.

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

The best way of handling pain was to study it objectively.

A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.

In the struggle for freedom of information, technology not politics will be the ultimate decider.

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!

After all, it has yet to be proved that intelligence has real survival value.

Science is the only religion of mankind.

Nothing is deader than yesterday's science-fiction.

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

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.

We have, as yet, no definite proof that too much brain, like too much armor, is not one of those unfortunate evolutionary accidents that leads to the annihilation of its possessors.

However it occurs, the detection of intelligent life beyond the Earth would change forever our outlook on the universe. At the very least, it would prove that intelligence does have some survival value -- a reassurance worth having after a session with the late news.

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.

Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers -- and thermonuclear weapons.

Perhaps one day men will no longer be interested in the unknown, no longer tantalized by mystery. This is possible, but when Man loses his curiosity one feels he will have lost most of the other things that make him human.

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological.

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.

A truly intelligent race is not likely to be unfriendly.

The planet had been slowed down -- but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System.

Shuttling back and forth in the equatorial plane where the brilliant stars of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto -- worlds that elsewhere would have counted as planets in their own right, but which here were merely satellites of a giant master.

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.

All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

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.

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.

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.

It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings.

Alan Bishop.

That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.

The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.

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

It goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world--that just beats me.

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

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.

Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.

Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.

I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.

What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity.

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.

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

When the reality was depressing, men tried to console themselves with myth.

No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.

Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

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

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

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

I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.

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.

'The Devil in the Dark' impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.

Personally, I refuse to drive a car -- I won't have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can't read.

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.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

Guns are the crutches of the impotent.

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.

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.

I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer -- one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

The future is not to be forecast, but created.

These leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

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 some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

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.

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

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.

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.

I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course; chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future.

Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten -- that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.

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

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.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

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

It's only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!

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

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

The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice.

It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.

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.

Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.

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

The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.

I think in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made ...This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that.

The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.

Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles... It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

No trilogy should have more than four books.

Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.

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.

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.

Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy -- of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.

Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it.

Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

The only place success comes before work is a dictionary

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

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

Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?

One by one she would cut through the orbits of Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion... worlds bearing the names of gods and goddesses who had vanished only yesterday, as time was counted here.

The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.

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.

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.

Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.

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.

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.

'2001' was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.

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

In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.

The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

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

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

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.

Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

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

Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.

If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

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

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 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.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.

When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.

Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.

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.

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

Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency.

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 information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.

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

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias -- boredom.

When, taking all factors into account, anything can be proved to be impossible, that usually means that it will be done in some different manner and employing a new and unforeseen technique.

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

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.

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

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

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 Devil in the Dark impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.

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

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

After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them -- -not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.

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

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

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?

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

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

Yet among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question:
Where do we go from here?

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

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

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.

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.

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

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

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

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

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

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

The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

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

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

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

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

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.