Arthur C. Clarke
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.Collection: Statistics
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.Collection: Understanding
All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.Collection: Happiness
The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.Collection: Men
I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.Collection: Religious
In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.Collection: Morning
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered.Collection: Space
Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.Collection: Crazy
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.Collection: Boredom
We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.Collection: Past
Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.Collection: Belief
Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.Collection: Fear
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.Collection: Mean
When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.Collection: Book
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.Collection: Government
Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time.Collection: Running
Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.Collection: Elderly
I think in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made . . .This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that.Collection: Running
When one has to ask, "Am I really in love?" the answer is always "No".Collection: Answers
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.Collection: Movie
We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.Collection: Earth
Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Beautiful
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.Collection: Sun
Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable.Collection: Technology
I will not be afraid because I understand ... And understanding is happiness.Collection: Understanding
I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.Collection: Believe
If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'Collection: Mean
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.Collection: Weed
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.Collection: Religious
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.Collection: Omnipotence
There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.Collection: Men
There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.Collection: Hope
The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.Collection: Equality
Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.Collection: Artist
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.Collection: Barbarians
Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.Collection: Humility
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.Collection: Differences
Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.Collection: Magic
Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)Collection: Science
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.Collection: Stranger
One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh.Collection: Farewell
I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.Collection: Intelligent
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.Collection: Thought Provoking
Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to useCollection: Reality
We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.Collection: Thinking
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.Collection: Stars
Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.Collection: Future
. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.Collection: Long Ago