“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)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intel…" by Arthur C. Clarke?

Arthur C. Clarke 207

British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… 1917–2008

Related quotes

“All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.”

Mikhail Bakunin book God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

“The Jew alone regard his race as superior to humanity, and looks forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them all and to its final ascendancy under the leadership of a tribal Messiah.”

Goldwin Smith (1823–1910) British historian and journalist

Source: October 1881. See The Nineteenth Century — A monthly review, Volume 10 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=QYEPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA813, edited by James Knowles, London, 1881.

“They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 31 (pp. 233-234)

“Homo sapiens is a child of the most ancient humans, resulting from their self-survival. Therefore, a tribute to them is love for humankind.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

“At certain epochs in history, the whole human race, from all points of the earth, fix their eyes upon some mysterious spot whence it seems that universal destiny is about to issue.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

“This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), p. 37
Context: People think that they have no right to judge a fact — all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.

“I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity — not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour — but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Life of Robert Owen (1857) his autobiography, as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'" (1990) http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c33.htm.

“The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Fifth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

“In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended the differences that divided them and had recognized in their membership in the human race a common bond.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address at Haile Selassie I University http://www.jah-rastafari.com/selassie-words/show-jah-word.asp?word_id=radhakrishan (now Addis Ababa University) honoring Indian President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (13 October 1965)

“We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 6, “Six Score Leagues Northwest of Paradise” Section 4 (p. 75)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Arthur C. Clarke 207

Related quotes

Related topics