Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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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!'
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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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SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
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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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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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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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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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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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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.
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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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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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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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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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The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
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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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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
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Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
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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.
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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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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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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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Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.