Arthur C. Clarke: Human

“Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other.”

Arthur C. Clarke

90th Birthday Reflections (2007)
Context: Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history — the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation…

Communication

“There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood's End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.”

Arthur C. Clarke

"God, Science, and Delusion: A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke" Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 19, Number 2 (Spring 1999) http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=clarke_19_2
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications
Context: There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood's End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions — each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others — how can someone possibly take any of them seriously? I mean, that's insane.... Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.

Childhood

“The best efforts of human scientists in this direction seemed comparable to those of Stone Age men trying to break through the armour of a bank vault with flint axes.”

Arthur C. Clarke

2010: Odyssey Two (1982), Ch. 43: Thought Experiment
1980s
Context: Plans for the final assault on Big Brother had already been worked out and agreed upon with Mission Control. Leonov would move in slowly, probing at all frequencies, and with steadily increasing power — constantly reporting back to Earth at every moment. When final contact was made, they would try to secure samples by drilling or laser spectroscopy; no one really expected these endeavours to succeed, as even after a decade of study TMA-1 resisted all attempts to analyse its material. The best efforts of human scientists in this direction seemed comparable to those of Stone Age men trying to break through the armour of a bank vault with flint axes.

Men , Age , Effort

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2010: Odyssey Two

Source: 2010: Odyssey Two

Fate , Nature , Universe

“The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.”

Arthur C. Clarke

Source: Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

Beauty , Search , Knowledge , Wealth

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

Arthur C. Clarke

"Sir Arthur's Quotations" http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/sir-arthurs-quotations/, The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.
Disputed

Law , Nature

“The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania.
Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.
The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 13 (p. 99)

Death , Men , Truth , Secret

“If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble…But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 4

People , Feeling , History , Problem

“Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 19

People , History , Memory , Past

“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)

Life , Men , Fools , History

“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)

Men , Way , Intelligence

“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 "Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90" by Ravi Nessman in the Associated Press (18 March 2008) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jfE8qUikNEG6MVWqYku2k8BD_RcgD8VG4VI00
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Age , History , Sea

“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

Freedom , Light , Joy

“There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world.”

Arthur C. Clarke book Death and the Senator

Death and the Senator, p. 744
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

Fear , History , Hope , Nature

“Whatever godlike powers and principalities lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important - Love and Death.”

Arthur C. Clarke

1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), p. 87

Star , Love , Death