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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

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

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Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.
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He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
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My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
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Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.
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Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
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Religion is a byproduct of fear.
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The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.
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Perhaps no other year before or since 1984 has been awaited with such eager anticipation.
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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.
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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.
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Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many.
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In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.
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You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.
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The only real problem in life is what to do next.
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A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
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Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
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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.
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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
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Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
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The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
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