Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRASwas a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 December 1917
Arthur C. Clarke quotes about
taken moon ideas
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
children ice fire
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
incompetence attributes malevolence
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
moon space-flight aviation
The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.
fear dark ideas
'The Devil in the Dark' impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.
growing
I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing.
gun crutches
Guns are the crutches of the impotent.
earth planets savagery
We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.
stranger
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
years space laughing
The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.
believe past men
I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.
blood wish fiction
Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that COULD happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that COULDN'T happen - though often you only wish that it could.
believe religion quests
You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.
envy mind may
They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.