Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence;.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

353. “On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples: he shrank from diverting its course.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

354. “Futilitarianism.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

355. “My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.’ Bisesa studied him. ‘You’ll have to tell me about your father.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

356. “Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

357. “This implies, of course, the development of a really compact and light-weight method of storing or producing electricity, at least an order of magnitude better than our present clumsy batteries. Such an invention has been overdue for about fifty years;.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

358. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

359. “Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label – SPACETASTIES – was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: ‘Guaranteed crumbless’.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

365. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

367. “I’d hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

368. “Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

369. “It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers a second. Anything like a regular schedule is out of the question; there are times when one must forget the whole idea and stay in port – or at least in orbit – waiting for the Solar System to rearrange itself for the greater convenience of Mankind.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

370. “Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

374. “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

375. “No one worried except a few philosophers. The race was too intent upon savoring its new-found freedom to look beyond the pleasures of the present. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias – boredom. Perhaps.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

376. “She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it’s not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

377. “Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

378. “Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and It.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

379. “Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

380. “Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness – the world of the desert – the world of the Invaders.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

381. “For it was their world, not Man’s. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

382. “The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

383. “How I envy them,” said Colonel Jones. “Sometimes it’s quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

384. “Hal’s internal fault predictor could have made a mistake.” “It’s more.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

385. “It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

386. “The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

387. “He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

388. “No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

389. “President of the Society for Creative Anachronisms.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

390. “The room you are about to enter,” the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, “is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

391. “Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

392. “This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

393. “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

394. “Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

395. “One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

396. “And as for the Council – tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.’ The.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

397. “I’ve just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction – they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

398. “CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

399. “Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

400. “Michael O’Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.”

— Arthur C. Clarke