Arthur C. Clarke

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.

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.

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

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

It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.

My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.

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

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.

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.

Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.

All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

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.

The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.

In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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.

When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.