Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it's full of stars!

Then I remembered that these men didn't seem any cleverer than I was; they were highly trained, that was all. If one worked hard enough, one could master anything.

Didn't somebody once say 'Politics is the art of the possible'?" "Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.

Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal—and power.

We are survivors. The only survivors. And survivors always feel guilty at being alive.

It seemed unfair that this should have happened in his time, after all these centuries of rest. But men cannot bargain with Fate, and choose peace or adventure as they wish.

humans who have lived through the singular experience of parenting without being irrevocably changed by the process. We all wonder, as our children grow into adults, what we have done, or not done, that has contributed to, or detracted from, the happiness of these special beings we have brought into existence. The

He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart. No one had really lived until they had achieved that synthesis of love and desire which he had never dreamed existed until he came to Lys. He

The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. The world was still living on the glories of a past that could never return.

And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN. And the Universe ceased to exist. Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE. It never had existed

I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn's excellent rule: 'If you gotta message, use Western Union.' This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.

Futilitarianism.

President of the Society for Creative Anachronisms.

News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation.

I am the biggest anachronism on Planet Earth.

Both times he had won through, but he knew well enough that any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic.

excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological.

Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other.

I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don't have much intelligence.

Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.

The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial.

Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous—merely undecided.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger. A.C.C.

I agree that was terrible—but what could my government do about it?" "A great deal—if it wished. But that would have offended the people who supplied it with oil—and bought its weapons, like the land mines that killed and maimed civilians by the thousands.