Quote

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

Arthur C. Clarke

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Arthur C. Clarke
Age: 90 †
Born: 1917
Born: December 16
Died: 2008
Died: March 19
Engineer
Explorer
Film Writer
Inventor
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Scientist
Screenwriter
Writer
Minehead
Somerset
Arthur Charles Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke
Charles Willis
Arthur Clarke
Dues
Merely
Never
Malevolence
Incompetence
Attribute
Attributes

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

Image
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The future is not to be forecast, but created.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
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.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The only real problem in life is what to do next.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Science is the only religion of mankind.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
'2001' was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a space station in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Training was one thing, reality another.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings. Alan Bishop
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
Arthur C. Clarke