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I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.

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
Thinking
Contact
Physical
Process
May
Malevolent
Self
Benign
Believe
Rapidly
Would
Aliens
Think
Programming

More quotes by 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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When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.
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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At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
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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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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Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
Arthur C. Clarke
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. . . 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
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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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Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
Arthur C. Clarke
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When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.
Arthur C. Clarke
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A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Arthur C. Clarke
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People go through four stages before any revolutionary development: 1. It's nonsense, don't waste my time. 2. It's interesting, but not important. 3. I always said it was a good idea. 4. I thought of it first.
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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Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Humor was the enemy of desire.
Arthur C. Clarke
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I'm quite fond of the writer who told a beginning author, If you've got a message, use Western Union.
Arthur C. Clarke
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The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.
Arthur C. Clarke
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A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.
Arthur C. Clarke
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We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.
Arthur C. Clarke