IRC discussion at Scifi.com (1 November 1996) http://web.archive.org/web/20021201214228/http://www.scifi.com/transcripts/aclarke.txt with Clarke and Gentry Lee
1990s
“Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!”
“The best proof that there’s intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn’t come here.”
Disputed
“The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.”
Arthur Rimbaud.
The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)
“I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington”
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications
Context: I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington … I'm reasonably sure there must be life in this solar system, on Mars or on Europa, and other places. I think life is probably going to be ubiquitous, though we still don't have any proof of that yet — and still less, any proof of intelligent life anywhere. But I hope that will be coming in the next decade or so through radio astronomy or, perhaps, the discovery of objects in space which are obviously artificial. Astronomical engineering — that may be the other thing to look for.
"Meeting of the Minds : Buzz Aldrin Visits Arthur C. Clarke" by Andrew Chaikin (27 February 2001) http://web.archive.org/web/20010302082528/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/aldrin_clarke_010227.html
“The universe is an intelligence test”
As quoted in Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: The world is full of intelligent, well-meaning people who, for one reason or another, did not attend university but are nonetheless well-read and educated. Out there on the prairie lost opportunities of youth were the rule rather than the exception, and I slowly became disabused of the myth of the Bright Young Thing and have not believed in it since.
