Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. We should get rid of it as quick as we can.

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

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe. Sometimes I think we're not. In both cases the thought is equally shocking.

I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

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.

The Ramans do everything in threes.

Perhaps our role on this planet is not to worship God — but to create Him.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

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

Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward and unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge ... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command ... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.

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.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...

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.

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.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming.