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I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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
Principles
Faith
Guiding
Opportunity
Prophecy
Self
Fulfilling
Great
Optimism
Principle
Offers
Creating

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.
Arthur C. Clarke
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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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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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. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.
Arthur C. Clarke
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It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
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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They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence their experiments did not always succeed.
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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I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future.
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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Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
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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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