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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

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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
True
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Ideas
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Hundred
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Valuable

More quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

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Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
Arthur C. Clarke
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... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.
Arthur C. Clarke
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No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
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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. . . 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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The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.
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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If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Now I understand,” said the last man.
Arthur C. Clarke
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Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!
Arthur C. Clarke
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If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble... But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.
Arthur C. Clarke
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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