Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

...As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new scientific theories in any field are regarded with skepticism because scientists become attached to the old perspective earlier in their careers.

I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates... or with big dogs.

We think that it is the best scientists working in the frontier fields of science who are best able to judge what is good and what is bad - if any - in the application of their scientific research.

We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.

Sometimes being old is used as an insult, which is bizarre because, if you're lucky, that's literally going to happen to you. It's a strange thing to gloat about: being born recently.

Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.

There is no debate here, just scientists and non-scientists. And since the subject is science, the non-scientists don't get a vote.

When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

Today, elderly people are discarded when, in reality, they are the seat of wisdom of the society...the right to life means allowing people to live and not killing, allowing them to grow, to eat, to be educated, to be healed, and to be permitted to die with dignity.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.

As a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. Today my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift - a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful.

People think being in your seventies means sitting around in a chair with a blanket over your legs, drooling.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.

Studios are run by those who are way too old or mostly young, who don't think creatively.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

I don't think films about elderly people have been made very much. I think of Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. But they always seem to be fairly successful, so it's a bit baffling as to why everybody has to be treated as if they were five-years-old.

Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts. But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.

It's inappropriate for an elderly chap to register, you know, authentically, his feelings, you know, because they really can be interpreted. So you have to get quite covert as you get older. Or you have to find some avuncular way, you know, of responding.

I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life.

...it's as empty as a merchant's soul. Sorry, Kheldar, it's just an old expression." "That's all right, Beldin," Silk forgave him grandly. "These little slips of the tongue are common in the very elderly.

I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.