Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

204. “The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

205. “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

206. “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

207. “How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions!”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

214. “It was idle to speculate, to build pyramids of surmise on a foundation of ignorance.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “Minkowski spacetime.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

225. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

238. “Discovery was no longer a happy ship.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

240. “I’ve been saying for a long time that I’m hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

242. “Training was one thing, reality another.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

243. “The time has come,” said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, “to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

244. “They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

245. “The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

246. “The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

247. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

249. “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

250. “I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.”

— Arthur C. Clarke