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Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

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
Never
Malevolence
Incompetence
Attribute
Attributes
Dues
Merely

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

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Training was one thing, reality another.
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.
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If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
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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One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke
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One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.
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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And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
Arthur C. Clarke
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There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?
Arthur C. Clarke
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He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
Arthur C. Clarke
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We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
Arthur C. Clarke
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... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.
Arthur C. Clarke
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In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.
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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All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke
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A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Now I'm a scientific expert that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
Arthur C. Clarke