Arthur C. Clarke Quotes - Page 3

I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.

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 person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.

I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.

If children have interests, then education happens.

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Guns are the crutches of the impotent.

The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth.

Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many.

We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.

If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.

In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind.

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.

I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.