Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke slips a scalpel between two kinds of authority: the kind that opens doors, and the kind that locks them. The line flatters the “elderly but distinguished” scientist just long enough to set a trap. Yes, experience earns a presumption of competence about what can be done with the tools and laws we already understand. But the moment that same authority declares a hard boundary - impossible - Clarke treats it as an emotional tell, not a rational verdict. “Impossible” here isn’t physics; it’s psychology wearing a lab coat.

The intent is less anti-science than anti-complacency. Clarke, a science-fiction writer who built narratives out of yesterday’s absurdities becoming today’s infrastructures, knew how often scientific progress arrives as an embarrassment to the gatekeepers. The subtext: expertise ages into risk management. Reputation becomes a conservative force; the distinguished mind starts defending a map it once helped redraw. Declaring something possible costs little. Declaring it impossible polices status, funding, and the story a field tells about itself.

Context matters: Clarke wrote in a century where flight, nuclear power, space travel, computing, and communications all went from speculative to mundane within a single lifespan. That compression makes “impossible” look like a historically naive word. The wit is in the asymmetry - “almost certainly” versus “very probably” - which reads like a statistical joke and a moral one: trust elders for what they’ve mastered, distrust them for what threatens their mastery. It’s a warning label for innovation culture, aimed at the respectable naysayer inside every institution.