Arthur C. Clarke
Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.Collection: Atheist
If children have interests, then education happens.Collection: Children
A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.Collection: Wise
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.Collection: Simple
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.Collection: Opportunity
We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...Collection: Past
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetenceCollection: Incompetence
Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.Collection: Mean
Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough.Collection: Science
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Collection: Faith
Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many.Collection: Judging
The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.Collection: Stars
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.Collection: Fiction
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.Collection: Mind
We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.Collection: Technology
The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.Collection: Stars
Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation. If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd that people everyone would laugh him to scorn. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.Collection: Laughing
Guns are the crutches of the impotent.Collection: Gun
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.Collection: Thinking
Now I understand,” said the last man.Collection: Men
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?Collection: Atheist
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.Collection: Death
We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.Collection: Fire
I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?Collection: Religious
In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind.Collection: Mind
When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.Collection: Beauty
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!Collection: Mean
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.Collection: Science
No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.Collection: Dream
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.Collection: Trying
I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?Collection: Thinking
The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.Collection: Intelligent
Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.Collection: House
The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth.Collection: Space
Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one.Collection: Powerful
I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.Collection: Careers
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.Collection: Technology
Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.Collection: Gravity
As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.Collection: Science
Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.Collection: Fighting
I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.Collection: Doubt
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.Collection: Taken
There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.Collection: Art
The Earth would only have to move a few million kilometers sunward-or starward-for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The Antarctic icecap would melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans would freeze and the whole world would be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough.Collection: Lying
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.Collection: Ocean
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.Collection: Dozen
A precondition for being a science fiction writer other than an interest in the future is that, an interest - at least an understanding of science, not necessarily a science degree but you must have a feeling for the science and its possibilities and its impossibilities, otherwise you're writing fantasy. Now, fantasy is also fine, but there is a distinction, although no one's ever been able to say just where the dividing lines come.Collection: Writing
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.Collection: Past