Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

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.

But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme....

[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

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.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.

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 towards new ends.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible

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

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell

…mysticism –perhaps the main aberration of the human mind.

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.

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelli

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

This is only a work of fiction, The Truth as always will be far stranger

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.

Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shandwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

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.

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.

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

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

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…

...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.