Quote

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.

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
Life
Planets
Beauty
Learn
Living
Geological
Thought
Savagery
Earth
Random
Thing
Defend
Always
Planet

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

Image
I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The future is not to be forecast, but created.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble... But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.
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
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
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
Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.
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
I don't believe in astrology I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist.
Arthur C. Clarke
Image
In this universe the night was falling the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.
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