The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke Quotations
We found 21 matching quotations.
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
We are just tenants on this world. We have just been given a new lease, and a warning from the landlord.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God-but to create him.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.