Childhood's End

by Arthur C. Clarke

It was rather a foolish thing to do but—well, I was only sixty at the time.”

Western man had relearned—what the rest of the world had never forgotten—that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

And the evidence is confused with mysticism—perhaps the prime aberration of the human mind.”

The gulf between two technologies can easily become so great that it is—lethal.”

No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating.

But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization….

It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”

It was strange how much one could alter in so short a time.

The fact that it was a mind not yet born was of no consequence, for Time is very much stranger than you think.”

In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.