Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

256. “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

257. “Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity – or, at the worst, bad manners.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

258. “There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

259. “A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled – and this did nothing at all to help – a phrase he had once come across: “Someone is walking over your grave.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

261. “Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

262. “Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service – in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist – he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

263. “That first Prime Monitor,” he said, “was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

265. “The piece of equipment I’m most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

268. “The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

269. “They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

270. “Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

271. “Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

272. “They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999 – but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

273. “Well, that’s a relief. You know that I have the greatest possible enthusiasm for this mission.” “I’m sure of it. Now please let me have.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

274. “You will find men like him in all the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

275. “Hal in full control of the ship. The.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

276. “Often we had no choice: we couldn’t reform the whole world. And didn’t somebody once say ‘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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

278. “Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become – for a while, at least – any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

279. “At some signal, floodlights around the lip of the crater were switched on, and the bright earthlight was obliterated by a far more brilliant glare. In the lunar vacuum the beams were, of course, completely invisible; they formed overlapping ellipses of blinding white, centered on the monolith. And where they touched it, its ebon surface seemed to swallow them. Pandora’s box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding – waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

280. “First rule of government of the people, by the people, for the people: Never tell the people!”

— Arthur C. Clarke

281. “You cannot reason with a rifle bullet fired from across the battlefield. You cannot negotiate with an artillery shell lobbed from over the horizon. You cannot compromise with a nuclear warhead screaming in from half a world away. The only answer to the gun, the only defense for the gun, has been more guns.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

282. “It goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world – that just beats me.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

283. “Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. They pointed out that Discovery, the fastest ship ever designed, would take twenty thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri – and millions of years to travel any appreciable distance across the Galaxy. Even if, during the centuries to come, propulsion systems improved out of all recognition, in the end they would meet the impassable barrier of the speed of light, which no material object could exceed.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

284. “If we are unable to download, remember us.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

285. “He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

286. “If we both believe that we have nothing to learn from the other, is it not obvious that we will both be wrong?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

287. “The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

288. “It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

289. “Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

290. “They had forgotten much, but they did not know it. They were as perfectly fitted to their environment as it was to them – for both had been designed together. What was beyond the walls of the city was no concern of theirs; it was something that had been shut out of their minds. Diaspar was all that existed, all that they needed, all that they could imagine. It mattered nothing to them that Man had once possessed the stars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

291. “You can’t have action without reaction.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

292. “Curnow had once remarked that Dr. Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

293. “And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

294. “There was awe, and there was also incredulity – sheer disbelief that the dead Moon, of all worlds, could have sprung this fantastic surprise.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

295. “It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

296. “Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

297. “Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. But however far they travel from their native world, human beings can never escape the diurnal rhythm, set ages ago by its cycle of light and darkness.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

298. “There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

299. “The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. The world was still living on the glories of a past that could never return.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

300. “The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.”

— Arthur C. Clarke