The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his
bathroom scale.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I don’t believe in astrology. I’m a Sagittarian and we’re very sceptical.
– Arthur C. Clarke
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent
to compensate. But for the moment I can’t think of it.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally
terrifying.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
– Arthur C. Clarke
Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up
by the phrases: (1) It’s completely impossible. (2) It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. (3) I
said it was a good idea all along.
– Arthur C. Clarke
One cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-
destroying.
– Arthur C. Clarke
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible – indeed, inevitable – the United
States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations
of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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
The three laws of prediction:
1. 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.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them
into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The statement that God created man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb in the
foundations of Christianity.
– Arthur C. Clarke
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I’ve been saying for a long time that I’m hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.
– Arthur C. Clarke
How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth,” when it is clearly “Ocean.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth – learning and loving. Nothing else – not
fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake – can possibly have the same lasting
value. For when your life is over, if you can say “I have learned” and “I have loved,” you will
also be able to say “I have been happy.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot
himself.
– Arthur C. Clarke
In the struggle for freedom of information, technology, not politics, will be the ultimate
decider.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds
of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set
off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for
long.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
– Arthur C. Clarke
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that
the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies
of stars.
– Arthur C. Clarke
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of
all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the
greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.
– Arthur C. Clarke
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let
me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not
foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
– Arthur C. Clarke
My favourite definition of an intellectual: Someone who has been educated beyond his/her
intelligence.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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
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 imaginations as well.
– Arthur C. Clarke, on his 90th birthday
As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90
orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don’t feel a day older than 89!
– Arthur C. Clarke
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self,
so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to
apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out
of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to
the meek.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
– Arthur C. Clarke
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests
showing that idea might be true.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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 non-existence of Zeus or Thor – but they have few
followers now.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The intelligence of the planet is constant, and the population is growing.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life – much less intelligence –
beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be
laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms
while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a
lifetime.
– Arthur C. Clarke
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking
about.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We
shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships,
computers – and thermonuclear weapons.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced
by unskilled labor.
– Arthur C. Clarke
We should always be prepared for future technologies, because otherwise they will come
along and clobber us.
– Arthur C. Clarke
After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond
between them – not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.
– Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two
The basis of morality is really very simple and doesn’t require religion at all. It’s this: “Don’t do
unto anybody else what you wouldn’t like to be done to you.” It seems to me that that’s all
there is to it.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.
– Arthur C. Clarke
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the
long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophecies seem laughably
conservative.
– Arthur C. Clarke
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
– Arthur C. Clarke
This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since
we may not have one.
– Arthur C. Clarke
The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space…
I’m very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they
didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space
program, it’ll serve us right!”
– Arthur C. Clarke
Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover
the yellow truth inside.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to
prevent the future.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Any path to knowledge is a path to God – or Reality – whichever word one prefers to use.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals
without the software.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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.
– Arthur C. Clarke
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.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of
astronomers.
– Arthur C. Clarke
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men
have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
– Arthur C. Clarke
2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history;
we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped
out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
– Arthur C. Clarke