Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2023 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. “No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

106. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

110. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

123. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, “Good-bye.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

142. “One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

144. “Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

145. “Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

146. “Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air, and other expendables. But, of course, that’s just how the Earth operates – on a slightly larger scale.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

147. “Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

148. “History never repeats itself – but historical situations recur.” As.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

149. “I am the biggest anachronism on Planet Earth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke