Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

You can show me some stick ice cream and I can tell you if it's good or not just looking at it.

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Statistics is the art of lying by means of figures.

If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.

Top Trumps appeared to be a game in which you got cards, and the cards had a picture (in this case, of a horse), and told you all kinds of stats for that horse, how fast it was, how big it was, etc. Whoever had the better horse won both the cards. You repeated this until someone had all the cards. So, basically it was exactly like high school, except it only took three minutes. Which was really a bit more humane, if you thought about it.

Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements.

Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.

The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.

Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics.

The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature -were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.

It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

I tend not to work with a specific person in mind. Art is a matter of statistics. It's not about individuals. It's about people.

A mouse relies not solely on one hole.

You can use data wrong. It's just like polling. There have been a lot of politicians who go conduct a poll to figure out what they believe.

I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort.

As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.

When all else failed, she tried being reasonable.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to _ n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!