Quotes from Arthur C Clarke

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.

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.

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.

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

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon it would lie outside the experience of all living men.

What are you doing, Dave?

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. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Here was the same sense of awe and mystery, and the sadness of the irrevocably vanished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater, both in time and in space, that the mind was unable to do it justice; after a while, it ceased to respond. Norton wondered if, sooner of later, he would take even Rama for granted.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

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

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.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.