Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon I cried

We should explore new ways to drive down the cost of space travel. instead of costly booster rockets, maybe we should think of laser/microwave driven rockets, or space elevators. Until then, the cost of space exploration will limit our ability to explore the universe.

At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.

The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.

I can't think that leaving Earth once is enough.

Now when we opened Disneyland, outer space was Buck Rogers.

In the Ridley Scott film 'The Martian' you can do that [virtually driving car]. I have lifted off in the space craft from the surface of Mars, walked in space and looked down into deep space and got terrified, with the headphones and the goggles.

Long-term, I see robotics prevailing on the moon. . . . The most important decision we'll have to make about space travel is whether to commit to a permanent human presence on Mars. Without it, we'll never be a true space-faring people.

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.

It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.

Oh, my. I'd forgotten how much I hate space travel.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Training was very extensive, and we dealt with many recoveries from emergencies, and fortunately, participating and observing and existing through the reality of space was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and it was not marred by unexpected hazards or catastrophes.

We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.

One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.

When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.

Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.

Space is hard - but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.