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Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

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
Magic
Technology
Insufficiently
Distinguishable
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More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

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The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.
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 information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.
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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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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I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
Arthur C. Clarke
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To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.
Arthur C. Clarke
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If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'
Arthur C. Clarke
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If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.
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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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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Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
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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Now I'm a scientific expert that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
Arthur C. Clarke