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The best proof that there’s intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn’t come here.
Arthur C. Clarke -
Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many.
Arthur C. Clarke
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There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come.
Arthur C. Clarke -
If children have interests then education happens.
Arthur C. Clarke -
'I am the King.' Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones - scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago - was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.
Arthur C. Clarke -
2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
Arthur C. Clarke -
After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on the ascertainable facts.
Arthur C. Clarke -
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Arthur C. Clarke
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I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
Arthur C. Clarke -
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
Arthur C. Clarke -
The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.
Arthur C. Clarke -
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Arthur C. Clarke -
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.
Arthur C. Clarke -
As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!
Arthur C. Clarke
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The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space … I'm very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: 'The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!'
Arthur C. Clarke -
Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.
Arthur C. Clarke -
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..
Arthur C. Clarke -
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke -
They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.
Arthur C. Clarke -
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea - in science, politics, art, or whatever - seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:(1) 'It's completely impossible - don't waste my time';(2) 'It's possible, but it's not worth doing';(3) 'I said it was a good idea all along.'
Arthur C. Clarke -
It is not my duty as an historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives.
Arthur C. Clarke -
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
Arthur C. Clarke -
We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.
Arthur C. Clarke