Arthur C. Clarke

He was awarded the Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 1998 Queens Honours List for his services to literature and astronomy.

He lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 1956 until his death in 2008.

Former member of the British Interplanetary Society.

He was awarded the CBE in the 1989 Queens Honours List for his services to literature and astronomy.

Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Clarke belt was named after him, following his proposal of the concept in 1945. It relates to the geosynchronous (also geostationary) orbit that satellites are placed into.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, vol. 130, pg. 72-81. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

According to a 1980 issue of "Science Digest," the Flat Earth Society credits him for scripting the allegedly fake moon-landings.

In 1997, his novel "A Fall of Moondust" was loosely adapted into a screenplay by Chris Soth. It was never filmed.

Enjoyed a friendly rivalry with fellow science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Appears in three astronomy documentaries by Space Viz: Contact: The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence , Odyssey of Survival and Planetary Defense . The latter work was nominated for a 2008 Arthur Clarke Award in the UK. The "Arthurs", as they are known, are recognized as the "Oscars" in British Space Achievements. Fellow nominees in 2008 included In the Shadow of the Moon , Sir Richard Branson and Prof. Stephen Hawking.

Inducted into the Space and Satellite Hall of Fame in 1987 (inaugural class).

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing,video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge,knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of,the other, and we need them all.

A well stocked mind is safe from boredom.

He uses a tame black hole as a filing system! [Describing Stanley,Kubrick],I want to be remembered most as a writer. I want to entertain readers,and hopefully stretch their imaginations as well.

They say that happiness is a childhood wish achieved in adult life. I,always wanted the biggest Meccano set. When I am completely senile all,I shall want is a large room with a soft carpet and the largest set.

If you understand 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) completely, we,failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we have answered.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Humor was the enemy of desire.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

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.

He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

There were, however, a few exceptions. One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…,This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger,Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.

[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

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.

. . . a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

And yet, even while they baffled him, they aroused within his heart a feeling he had never known before. When- which was not often, but sometimes happened- they burst into tears of utter frustration or despair, their tiny disappointments seemed to him more tragic than Man’s long retreat after the loss of his Galactic Empire. That was something too huge and remote for comprehension, but the weeping of a child could pierce one to the heart. Alvin had met love in Diaspar, but now he was learning something equally precious, and without which love itself could never reach its highest fulfillment but must remain forever incomplete. He was learning tenderness.

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as "See--no weapons"? But no one could think of anything better.

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions. They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible,Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.

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.

. . the happy hum of humanity.

Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?,Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but the individuality would have gone,Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shandwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.

Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

But the characteristic that is truly special about our species. . . [is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme. . . .

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.

The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.

Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.

Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

…mysticism –perhaps the main aberration of the human mind.

In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fictionwriter. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three],If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological,Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence,Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

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

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

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.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.

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.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society. .