Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject.

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

There are so many aspects of human sexuality that we're afraid to talk about, because people still don't understand it. It's not just black and white, you know?

Some men are deeply likable but have attitudes I don't like. Does that mean I should completely dismiss them? It's like saying: if someone votes Tory can you like them? And, yes, I can. I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways. We have a tendency to oversimplify things.

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with.

I just feel like we as a human race tend to fear that which we don't understand. It's cause for a lot of bad things and bad behavior to exist on the planet. Artists have a way of touching people and changing minds in a way that sometimes other mediums don't.

It's hard for the majority of people to accept what they don't understand.

My characters make incomprehensible decisions until you stand in their shoes. Then it makes more sense. Life is very rarely black and white, and most people are trying to do their best. I try not to judge.

There are so many things to talk about between black people, Hispanic people, white people, gay people, men, women, it's all based on fear. We all have fears, this thing that stops us from embracing as we are one. We are never going to be one. People are messed up, but humor lets us see how ignorant we can be.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

I think the best science fiction, especially literature, is political in nature and is often an allegory about something problematic in our world, and it's something that makes the 'X-Men' comics so relevant - they're about xenophobia and prejudice.

Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.

I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.

It's not diversity that is going to destroy us, but fear of diversity.

'Push back' is the word; that's what we gotta do against ignorance. I see so much of it, and it's dangerous.

You don't have to read the Quran to love me... love the actions, love the things that I do. Look at those, and that will help people get beyond whatever fear or stereotypical thing that they might be thinking about.

Stereotypes are convenient. And yet within them, everyone will say there's something that - you know, they don't come for no reason. It's just that it takes time to explore complexity.

Characters, like people, don't need to be right - only understood and, perhaps, accepted. We are all grey, lighter and darker, depending on our state of security.

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

I'm not here to talk about bigotry in the sense that I don't know what's in Donald Trump's heart. I hope that it's a heart of compassion.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

Religion has nothing more to fear than not being sufficiently understood.

Prejudice comes from being in the dark; sunlight disinfects it.

Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.

The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.