Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You don’t believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

103. “The future is not to be forecast, but created.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

105. “Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

106. “Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

107. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

109. “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?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

113. “Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

114. “If children have interests then education happens.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

115. “God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

116. “One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

117. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

118. “Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

119. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

120. “I am having difficulty in maintaining contact with Earth. The trouble is in the AE-35 unit. My Fault Prediction Center reports that it may fail within seventy-two hours.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

121. “The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium – the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy” – that life depends.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

123. “The drought had lasted for 10 million years now, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

124. “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

126. “Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

128. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

129. “Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

130. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

131. “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

132. “Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

133. “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

134. “Magic is just science we haven’t figured out yet.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

135. “No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

136. “Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

137. “SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

138. “The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

139. “But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered;.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

140. “There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

141. “Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine – whether by typewriter or microphones was immaterial – without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease. The.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

142. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

143. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

144. “Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color – the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets – of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

145. “During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

146. “The fax machine now allows us to exchange ideas almost in real time; it’s far more convenient than the Electronic Mail.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

148. “For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion–the cause of so much misery and so much poetry–that every man has only one real love in his life.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

149. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

150. “No electronic computer can match the human brain at associating apparently irrelevant facts.”

— Arthur C. Clarke