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Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Film writer

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Famous Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

“The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing. . . . The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.”

“Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion.... Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space.”

“Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.”