Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
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Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea - in science, politics, art, or whatever - seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:(1) 'It's completely impossible - don't waste my time';(2) 'It's possible, but it's not worth doing';(3) 'I said it was a good idea all along.'
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Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor … Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done - and was about to do.
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What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
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As quoted in Seeds of Peace : A Catalogue of Quotations (1986) by Jeanne Larson, Madge Micheels-Cyrus, p. 244
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Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
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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.
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It is not my duty as an historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives.
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They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.
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Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
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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.
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There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
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The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
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Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
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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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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
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If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.
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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.