Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

302. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

304. “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

305. “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

306. “The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials – these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

307. “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

308. “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

309. “Beyond gravity, some of that freedom was regained; with the loss of weight went many of the cares and worries of Earth. Heywood.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

310. “Can you sum up your ideas in less than – oh, a thousand bits?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

313. “What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

318. “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

319. “Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don’t age so quickly – they’ll live longer than we do.” Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the unusually delicate bone structure.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “Floyd made it a rule never to worry about events over which he could have absolutely no control; any external threat would reveal itself in due time and must be dealt with then. But he could not help wondering if they had done.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

326. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

328. “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

329. “This was the fundamental problem with rockets – and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

331. “I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn’s excellent rule: ‘If you gotta message, use Western Union.’ This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

332. “Men had sought beauty in many forms – in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

333. “All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

334. “The long-heralded global village is almost upon us, but it will last for only a flickering moment in the history of mankind. Before we even realise that it has come, it will be superseded – by the global family.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

335. “An author should never turn down the opportunity for a new experience.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

336. “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

337. “Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

338. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

340. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

341. “Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

342. “There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

343. “I hope you’re right. Apart from that, won’t there be trouble when he discovers what you’re trying to do? Because he will, you know.” “I’ll take that risk. Besides, we understand each other rather well.” The physicist toyed with his pencil and stared into space for a while. “It’s a very pretty problem. I like it,” he said simply. Then he dived into a drawer and produced an enormous writing pad, quite the biggest that Stormgren had ever seen.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

344. “And then there came a sound which Moon-Watcher could not possibly have identified, for it had never been heard before in the history of the world. It was the clank of metal upon stone.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

345. “It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

346. “It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

347. “The billion-year battle against the force of gravity was over.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

348. “After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

349. “Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

350. “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