Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
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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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Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
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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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As quoted in Seeds of Peace : A Catalogue of Quotations (1986) by Jeanne Larson, Madge Micheels-Cyrus, p. 244
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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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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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I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
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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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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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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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We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return … The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation … the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
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A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
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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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Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
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The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
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We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.
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There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.
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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
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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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It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
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Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
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Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.
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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.