Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while – perhaps as much as ten minutes – to locate the line in the whole body of English literature.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

254. “That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him – or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it – but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

256. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

266. “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

267. “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

268. “The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

275. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

278. “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

279. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

280. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

287. “A hundred failures would not matter, when one single success could change the destiny of the world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

291. “They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

293. “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

294. “Myron, like countless NCO’s before him, had discovered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

296. “Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

297. “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

298. “The origin of the universe might be forever unknown, but all that had happened after obeyed the laws of physics.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

300. “We’re particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10 – the first man-made object to escape from the Solar System.”

— Arthur C. Clarke