Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.
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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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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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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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The Ramans do everything in threes.
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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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Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death...
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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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Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
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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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If children have interests then education happens.
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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.
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SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
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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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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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I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
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Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.
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I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..
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Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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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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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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Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
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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.
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Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.