Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

202. “He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

203. “They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

204. “Civilization and Religion are incompatible” and “Faith is believing what you know isn’t true.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

205. “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

206. “There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood’s End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

207. “Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to – ugh – eat them became economically impossible. I don’t know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants it produced. And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

208. “Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

209. “Don’t blame me for what happened on Earth,” he said. “I’ve never been there, and I never will –.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

210. “He pressed the button, and waited. Several minutes later, a metal arm moved out from the bunk, and a plastic nipple descended toward his lips. He sucked on it eagerly, and a warm, sweet fluid coursed down his throat, bringing renewed strength with every drop.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

211. “Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

212. “Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

213. “My colleagues and I, Dr. Floyd, will stake our reputations on this. TMA-1 has nothing to do with the Chinese. Indeed, it has nothing to do with the human race – for when it was buried, there were no humans. “You see, it is approximately three million years old. What you are now looking at is the first evidence of intelligent life beyond the Earth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

214. “No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges – absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!”

— Arthur C. Clarke

215. “It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

216. “Theists believe there’s not more than one God; Deists that there is not less than one God.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

217. “At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved – if it can be achieved at all – within the next few hundred years.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

218. “Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

219. “Minkowski spacetime.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

220. “And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

221. “Dr. C. informs me that, in technical terminology, Hal became trapped in a Hofstadter–Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

222. “Someone once said that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, attractive... and wrong.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

223. “For if not true, they are well imagined...”

— Arthur C. Clarke

224. “Moon-Watcher and his companions had no recollection of what they had seen, after the crystal had ceased to cast its hypnotic spell over their minds and to experiment with their bodies. The next day, as they went out to forage, they passed it with scarcely a second thought; it was now part of the disregarded background of their lives. They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

225. “He was alone in an airless, partially disabled ship, all communication with Earth cut off. There was not another human being within half a billion miles. And yet, in one very real sense, he was not alone. Before he could be safe, he must be lonelier still.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

226. “Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” – John W. Campbell.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

227. “I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

228. “No group can survive, let alone thrive, unless what is good for the overall community is more important than individual freedom. Take, for example, resource allocation. How can anyone with any intelligence possibly justify, in terms of the overall community, the accumulation and hoarding of enormous material assets by a few individuals when others do not even have food, clothing, and other essentials?” In.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

229. “The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

230. “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

231. “Do you believe in ghosts, Dim?” “Certainly not: but like every sensible man, I’m afraid of them. Why do you ask?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

232. “Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

233. “But there was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

234. “God was just this black void that we cried into.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

235. “Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

236. “Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true – which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

237. “Call it the Star Gate.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

238. “The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

239. “The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

240. “They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

241. “As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

242. “The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten – that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

243. “Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

244. “Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

245. “The outermost – Jupiter XXVII – moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

246. “No need to go to the dolphins,” interjected Max Brailovsky. “One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he’d won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste!”

— Arthur C. Clarke

247. “There is something very strange about a universe where a few dead butterflies can balance a billion-ton tower.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

248. “In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: “Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

249. “All bureaucracies are the same. They drain the life out of the truly creative people and develop mindless paper-pushers as their critical mass.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

250. “The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented – sometimes, indeed, unhealthy – boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole – or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke