Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

321. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

330. “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

331. “There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

335. “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

336. “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

337. “Yet there was also something slightly spooky about them. Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Cosmo Christers state as incontrovertible fact.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

339. “Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

340. “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

341. “I agree with you, Captain,” he whispered. “The human race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Hermians argue, survival is not everything.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

342. “There’s an ancient philosophical joke that’s much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

343. “For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

344. “When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

345. “I’m a tone-deaf siren, a wallflower at the mating dance. And I do wonder why men can’t want me for me. I’m smart, I don’t defer, and I didn’t put making babies number one on my list of priorities.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

346. “Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

348. “Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

349. “Nothing in this scene will be changed by my death, Nicole thought. There will just be one less pair of eyes to observe its splendor. And one less collection of chemicals risen to consciousness to wonder what it all means.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

350. “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