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Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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We will not exhaust the marvels of the physical Universe until we have explored the whole Cosmos - and that prospect is still, to say the least, satisfyingly remote, if indeed it is theoretically possible. We have scarcely begun a voyage of discovery which may never have an end.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Arthur C. Clarke
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If ships from Earth ever set out to conquer other worlds they may find themselves, at the end of their journeys, in the position of painted war-canoes drawing slowly into New York Harbor.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Like Great Britain, the Moon has no climate - only weather.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Sorry to interrupt the festivities, but we have a problem.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
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With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible — and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry from their pens.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Before one attempts to set up in business as a prophet, it is instructive to see what success others have made of this dangerous occupation — and it is even more instructive to see where they have failed.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The universes... drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Though the specific ideals of astronautics are new, the motives and impulses underlying them are old as the race — and in the ultimate analysis, they owe as much to emotion as to reason. Even if we could learn nothing in space that our instruments would not already tell us, we should go there just the same.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.
Arthur C. Clarke
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"But no-one expected he'd ever get very far, because I don't suppose he could even integrate e to the x." "Is such ignorance possible?" gasped someone.
Arthur C. Clarke
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There are still some scientists who consider that there is no point in sending men into space, even when it becomes technically possible; machines, they argue, can do all that is necessary. Such an outlook is incredibly shortsighted; worse than that, it is stupid, for it completely ignores human nature.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Whoever attempts to erect a building, should take care that the foundation be securely laid; so also in our inquiries after truth, all our proceedings should be founded upon just and incontrovertible grounds.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Prophecy is a dangerous and thankless business, frequently fatal to those who practice it.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Jesearc sat motionless within a whirlpool of numbers.... He was fascinated by the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, apparently according to no laws, across the spectrum of integers.
Arthur C. Clarke
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There are more suns in the whole of space than there are grains of sand on all the shores of Earth; and on any one of those grains, there may be civilizations that will make us look like primitive, ignorant savages.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing.... The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The urge to explore, to discover, to "follow knowledge like a sinking star," is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence.
Arthur C. Clarke
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"I'd be glad to settle without the theory," remarked Kimball, "if I could even understand what this thing is — or what it's supposed to do."
Arthur C. Clarke
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Arthur C. Clarke
Born:
December 16, 1917
Died:
March 19, 2008
(aged 90)
Bio:
Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
Known for:
Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Childhood's End (1953)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2061: Odyssey Three (1987)
2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
Most used words:
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life
men
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earth
future
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intelligent
stars
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