Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

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

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.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ...

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

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

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."

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

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.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

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

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.