Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

257. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

259. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

261. “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

262. “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

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. “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

265. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

272. “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

273. “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

274. “He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

275. “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

276. “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

277. “Call it the Star Gate.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

278. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

284. “Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

287. “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

288. “But at least we have answered one ancient question. We are not alone. The stars will never again be the same to us.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

289. “Cassini – who discovered Japetus in 1671 – also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

290. “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

291. “Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.”

— 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. “But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

294. “A major part of his job was deciding when warnings could be ignored, when they could be dealt with at leisure – and when they had to be treated as real emergencies. If he paid equal attention to all the ship’s cries for help, he would never get anything done. He.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

295. “Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

296. “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

297. “The familiar can be as shocking as the strange – when it is in the wrong place.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

298. “Instantly, there had been cries of protest from the industrial archaeologists, outraged at such vandalism, and from the naturalists, who pointed out that the penguins simply loved the abandoned pipeline.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

299. “There could be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

300. “There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence – or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly’s wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.”

— Arthur C. Clarke