Arthur C. Clarke Quotations | Page 2

Guns are the crutches of the impotent.

You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.

Humor was the enemy of desire.

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

The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.

. . . 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.

2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history ; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.

SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.

Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space , and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith . They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.