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
intellectual creationism pernicious
Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.
religious nice intelligent
I have encountered a few 'creationists' and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind ?
lying ocean moving
The Earth would only have to move a few million kilometers sunward-or starward-for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The Antarctic icecap would melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans would freeze and the whole world would be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough.
imagination people chemistry
... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.
reality training statistics
Training was one thing, reality another.
beautiful ambition grandchildren
Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.
stars men challenges
In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.
dream stars inspiration
Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . . Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures.
lying future space
Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
real dwarves dying
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.
running country simple
I think in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made . . .This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that.
everyday doubt one-day
I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.
space limits
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered.
trying fiction science-fiction
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.