Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

People call me an optimist, but I'm really an appreciator ... years ago, I was cured of a badly infected finger with antibiotics when once my doctor could have recommended only a hot water soak or, eventually, surgery.... When I was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I'm grateful for computers and photocopiers ... I appreciate where we've come from.

You can be sure that over the next 10 years, you'll see something that you did not think was possible.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.

My experience in science has always been that the future always exceeds what we believe is possible. I suspect that we will explore the universe.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

I don't know whether I'm, like, jumping the gun but it's possible that in the future we may be able to use the information that we can't receive at the moment.

All of the good stuff is going to be done in the future. The stuff we are doing now is crummy compared with what will finally mature.

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

The advancement of the arts (technology) from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

What seems impossible today, may half a century hence have become commonplace.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

Are machines getting more and more powerful? Absolutely. It's been going on since 1940. We are making progress, and for many people, it will be a lifesaver.

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle.

I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.

One of the interesting and exciting things about my job is watching technological ground being pioneered.

Men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

Now, with the Internet, you're either five years ahead or you're five years behind, and the music game is catchin' up right now.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.

We know enough to be sure that the scientific achievements of the next fifty years will be far greater, more rapid, and more surprising, than those we have already experienced. ... Wireless telephones and television, following naturally upon the their present path of development, would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window.

I was born in 1929, and in the 50 years from 1930 to 1980, I've been able to live an unbelievably varied century. Before, you could never have seen such intense change in a 50-year span.