New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!
"Sir Arthur Charles Clarke", Commander of the Order of the British Empire/CBE, Royal Astronomical Society/FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
He is perhaps most famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)/2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo award/Hugo and Nebula award/Nebula awards, along with a large readership, making him into one of the towering figures of the field. For many years he, Robert A. Heinlein/Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system—an idea that, in 1963, won him the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal and other honors. Later he was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–47 and again in 1951–53.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous writers! More Arthur C. Clarke on Wikipedia.The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
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?
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
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.
But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..
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.
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
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.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
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 non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.
We are just tenants on this world. We have just been given a new lease, and a warning from the landlord.
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.
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