Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made.

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.

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

It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.

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.

Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time," Anderson explained. "Raising animals to—ugh—eat them became economically impossible. I don't know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants it produced. And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques.

Well, that's a relief. You know that I have the greatest possible enthusiasm for this mission." "I'm sure of it. Now please let me have

All we want from Thalassa is a hundred thousand tons of water. Or, to be more specific, ice.

If humans could not be rid of religion, it was argued, then let them at least not be harmed by it.

Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men

Yaln?zca zaman?n derman olabileceÄŸi baz? ÅŸeyler vard? hayatta. Kötüler yok edilebilirdi, ancak akl? kar??m?? iyi birine hiçbir ÅŸey yap?lamazd?.

a real danger by giving it an absurd name, the designations were often facetious: the Godel Gremlin, the Mandelbrot Maze, the Combinatorial Catastrophe, the Transfinite Trap, the Conway Conundrum, the Turing Torpedo, the Lorenz Labyrinth, the Boolean Bomb, the Shannon Snare, the Cantor Cataclysm…

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying

Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear—a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.

With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while—perhaps as much as ten minutes—to locate the line in the whole body of English literature.

It's not any kind of rock—it crumbles when I touch it—I feel as if I'm exploring a giant Gruyère cheese…

Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been.

One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water.

For it was their world, not Man's. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars.

There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer.

It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago.

You are rather too fond of talking in riddles,' complained Jeserac.

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color—the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets—of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth.