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Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Arthur C. Clarke

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Arthur C. Clarke
Age: 90 †
Born: 1917
Born: December 16
Died: 2008
Died: March 19
Engineer
Explorer
Film Writer
Inventor
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Scientist
Screenwriter
Writer
Minehead
Somerset
Arthur Charles Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke
Charles Willis
Arthur Clarke
Stories
Detectives
Politicians
Politician
Fiction
Politics
Read
Science
Westerns
Political
Detective

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

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It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
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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The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.
Arthur C. Clarke
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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.
Arthur C. Clarke
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I will not be afraid because I understand ... And understanding is happiness.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Humor was the enemy of desire.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.
Arthur C. Clarke
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If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.
Arthur C. Clarke
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It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings. Alan Bishop
Arthur C. Clarke
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Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Training was one thing, reality another.
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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Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a space station in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)
Arthur C. Clarke
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But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!
Arthur C. Clarke
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Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.
Arthur C. Clarke