Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.

The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it-we mean to lead it.

Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth's surface. In millions of years their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves. They will control the climate and the Solar System just as they control the Earth. They will travel beyond the limits of our planetary system; they will reach other Suns, and use their fresh energy instead of the energy of their dying luminary.

A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there-a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle.

Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable.

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

The fourth landing of the Columbia is the historical equivalent of the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad. It marks our entrance into a new era.

Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.

Olduvai Gorge gives us one of the most remarkable stories of the past-the last chapter of the Earth's history, starting at the present day, right away back 2 million years.

We will certainly be focused on making sure that the prosperity we have been able to accomplish in the past 8 years under the leadership of Mr. [Barack] Obama, continues.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page of the policies of the past.

You know all the money we spend on nuclear weapons and defence every year? Trillions of dollars? Correct? Trillions. Instead, if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world,which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, not one, we could, as one race, explore outer space together in peace forever

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

Humans change themselves through technology.

The family today counts for less and less. Why? Who knows - the growth of science, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the world war we've made, the new philosophies we've created; certainly something is happening to man, so why go against it, why oblige this new man to live by the mechanisms and regulations of the past?

I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.

Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . . Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures.

The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads . . . the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.

We are at that very point in time when a 400-year old age is rattling in its death bed and another is struggling to be born.