Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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The best proof that there’s intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn’t come here.
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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.
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Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
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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.
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The Ramans do everything in threes.
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The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
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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.
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Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination - for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
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Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it.
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Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many.
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As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!
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One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.
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Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
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There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
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We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return … The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation … the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
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I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
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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.
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A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
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If children have interests then education happens.
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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.
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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.
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The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space … I'm very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: 'The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!'
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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.
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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.