Arthur C. Clarke: Trending quotes

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Arthur C. Clarke: 414 quotes13 likes

“I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.”

Arthur C. Clarke

"Appendix II: MITE for Morons," The Odyssey File (1984), p. 123
On Clarke's Laws

“The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.”

Arthur C. Clarke

As quoted in the [Sri Lanka] Sunday Times (31 December 2000) http://www.sundaytimes.lk/001231/news4.html <br class="br">2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

“Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor … Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done — and was about to do.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 39 “The Wounded Sun” (p. 208)

“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

Foreword to The Collected Stories (June 2000)
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

“Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 16 “Conversations with Starglider” (p. 96)

“If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 2 (p. 13)

“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

"Credo" (1991); also in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), p. 360
1990s

“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

Quoted in And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker (1992) by Ashton Applewhite, Tripp Evans and Andrew Frothingham, p. 279
1990s

“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

As quoted in &quot;Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90&quot; by Ravi Nessman in the Associated Press (18 March 2008) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jfE8qUikNEG6MVWqYku2k8BD_RcgD8VG4VI00 <br class="br">2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

“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 book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 10 “The Ultimate Bridge” (p. 52)

“If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 26

“Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!”

Arthur C. Clarke

Electronic Tutors (1980)
1980s

“Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 35 “Starglider Plus Eighty” (p. 190)

“Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.”

Arthur C. Clarke

Attributed to Clarke on the internet, this has also been attributed to Isaac Asimov in published works.
Disputed

“It is not my duty as an historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 24 (p. 183)

“One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 43 “Fail-Safe” (p. 223)

“All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.”

Arthur C. Clarke

2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
1980s

“The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 53 “Fade-Out” (pp. 272-273)

“There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 5 (p. 37)

“The rash assertion that 'God made man in His own image' is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths, and as the hierarchy of the universe is disclosed to us, we may have to recognize this chilling truth: if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.”

Arthur C. Clarke

Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)