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It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.
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
Start
Miss
Idea
Scientist
Preconceived
Ideas
Conservative
Investigating
Really
Amazing
Margins
Mark
Impossibility
Missing
Competent
Quite
Engineers
Impossible
Scientists
More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke
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
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
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
Arthur C. Clarke
A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.
Arthur C. Clarke
It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
Arthur C. Clarke
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.
Arthur C. Clarke
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
Arthur C. Clarke
You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.
Arthur C. Clarke
Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.
Arthur C. Clarke
Training was one thing, reality another.
Arthur C. Clarke
One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.
Arthur C. Clarke
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
Arthur C. Clarke
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Arthur C. Clarke
New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!
Arthur C. Clarke
When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.
Arthur C. Clarke
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Arthur C. Clarke
