Arthur C. Clarke

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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.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (born 16 December 1917) British author and inventor

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We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
- Exploration of Space (1952)

Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "Foreword"

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
- Electronic Tutors (1980)

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.
- 1984: Spring (1984)

Perhaps our role on this planet is not to worship God — but to create Him.
- Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (1972) "The Mind of the Machine"

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.
- Forward to The Collected Stories (June 2000)

It is later than you think. May it not be true for this Sundial.
- University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka 1996 The Sundial on a Novel Concept

I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives - pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge - when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.
- Rama II(1989(Richard Wakefield))

SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
- Seti@Home Donor List (2006)

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Clarke's Three Laws

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Source: the essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, in his book Profiles of the Future (1962); This statement is often referred to as "Clarke's First Law"

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Source: the essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, in his book Profiles of the Future (1962); This statement is often referred to as "Clarke's Second Law"

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Source: Profiles of the Future (revised edition 1973); The statement is often referred to as "Clarke's Third Law"

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Attributed

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

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.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

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

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

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

My favourite definition of 'Intellectual' is: 'A person whose education surpasses their intelligence.'
- Clarke may not have been first to say this.

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

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

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 non-existence of Zeus or Thor— but they have few followers now.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

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

The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information— in the sense of raw data— is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

The intelligence of the planet is constant, and the population is growing.

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

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

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