Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRASwas a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 December 1917
gun crutches
Guns are the crutches of the impotent.
believe religion quests
You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.
enemy desire
Humor was the enemy of desire.
mean body offense
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
years space laughing
The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.
believe past men
I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.
taken moon ideas
. . . 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.
lying sea forever
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.
government important quests
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
religious attitude regret
Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space , and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith . They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
broken mind statistics
Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.
statistics eyeballs rely
When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.
communication sky would-be
One orbit, with a radius of 42,000 kilometers, has a period of exactly 24 hours. A body in such an orbit, if its plane coincided with that of the Earth's equator, would revolve with the Earth and would thus be stationary above the same spot on the planet. It would remain fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere ... [to] provide coverage to half the globe, and for a world service three would be required, though more could be readily utilized. (1945) [Predidicting geosynchronous communication satellites]
religious funeral kind
Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral