Childhood's End

by Arthur C. Clarke

Then Reinhold Hoffmann knew, as did Konrad Schneider at this same moment, that he had lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia.

This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride.

Surely the world had had enough of marching mobs and angry slogans!

“I wish people would stop thinking of me as a dictator, and remember I’m only a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy in whose shaping I had no hand.”

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.

Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.

“All political problems,” Karellen had once told Stormgren, “can be solved by the correct application of power.”

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.

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.

No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.

“It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”

Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

A society consists of human beings whose behavior as individuals is unpredictable. But if one takes enough of the basic units, then certain laws begin to appear—as was discovered long ago by life insurance companies.

once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization….

Only Jennifer Anne had not yet decided whether she liked the colony. That, however, was hardly surprising, for she had so far seen nothing of the world beyond the plastic panels of her cot, and had, as yet, very little suspicion that such a place existed.

George was not a person who thought deeply on such matters, yet sometimes it seemed to him that men were like children amusing themselves in some secluded playground, protected from the fierce realities of the outer world.

Nothing in Athens was done without a committee, that ultimate hallmark of the democratic method.

Sometimes, Jean thought a little wearily, he filled to perfection the classic recipe for a small boy: “a noise surrounded by dirt.”

We have never been more than guardians, doing a duty imposed upon us from—above. That duty is hard to define: perhaps you can best think of us as midwives attending a difficult birth. We are helping to bring something new and wonderful into being.”

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.

So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had ever foreseen—an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.

no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

Jan had always been a good pianist—and now he was the finest in the world.