Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

352. “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

353. “If we are unable to download, remember us.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

354. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

356. “Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here they had been turned to the purposes of peace. After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war.”

— 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. “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

359. “But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

364. “I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

365. “That’s still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you’re the only person who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

370. “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. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

371. “I thought this couldn’t happen in astronomy. Isn’t celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

372. “And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of Love and Art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

374. “One hemisphere was a giant bull’s-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

380. “I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

382. “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

383. “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

384. “And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

386. “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

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

388. “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

389. “Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

390. “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

391. “He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

392. “Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input. If they are deprived of it, the mind manufactures its own substitutes.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

393. “We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

394. “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

395. “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

396. “Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

397. “This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, ‘Mere dead matter’ was one of their favourite phrases.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

399. “Ladies and gentlemen, those flames from the port engines are perfectly normal. The stewardess will be coming around in a moment to serve coffee, tea, or milk. I’m sorry we don’t have anything stronger on this flight – regulations don’t permit it.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

400. “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