Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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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.
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The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers - and thermonuclear weapons.
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I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.
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I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..
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Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor … Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done - and was about to do.
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The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
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Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.
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Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
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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.'
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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.
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What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.
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What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts-indeed, sometimes from no facts-in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control.
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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.
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Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
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As quoted in Seeds of Peace : A Catalogue of Quotations (1986) by Jeanne Larson, Madge Micheels-Cyrus, p. 244
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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
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Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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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.
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Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
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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.
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If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.
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If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
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The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.