Quote

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.

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
Tries
Seldom
Prevent
Fiction
Future
Often
Science
Predict
Trying
Attempts

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

Image
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.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence their experiments did not always succeed.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
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.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. The only place success comes before work is a dictionary Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
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.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
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
Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
Arthur C. Clarke