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
thinking play evil
I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?
ifs
If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.
morning taken technology
Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive.
space happenings
Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.
stars thinking clouds
I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
elderly would-be way
Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.
men hair critics
A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.
stars lying moon
Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.
moon space-flight aviation
The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.
moon night views
The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.
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.
technology differences machines
The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labour.
running long secret
In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.
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.