Arthur C. Clarke

... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.

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.

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

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!

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

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?

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

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.

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.

I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

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 intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.