A Quote by Arthur C. Clarke
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.
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Whether my acting was obscene, or whether it was distasteful, well, Judge Rehnquist, who just recently passed away couldn't define pornography. His comment on pornography was, "I may not be able to define it but I know it when I see it." That's not law. That's definitely not law. Really, this trial should have been an organized crime trial. About murder and tax evasion and brutalizing people. Not about obscenity.
Not everybody wants to call sin 'sin'! Some call it mischief. Some call it rebellion. And hardly anybody can agree where we should draw the line. ... Our courts are ... trying to define pornography, yet moral law is very specific to any reader of God's Word.
Political pornography is not unlike the sexual kind: difficult to define, but you know it when you see it
Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.
Pornography is pornography, what is there to see? Movies are attempting to destroy something that's supposed to be the most beautiful thing a man and a woman can have by making it cheap and common. It's what you don't see that's attractive.
I may not be able to define pornography but I know it when I see it.
Intelligence is like pornography. I can't define it, but I know if when I see it.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
Pornography is about images that are repeated, saturated. Images of the human body, not nature. What I find in pornography is precisely the repetition of the same: the clichés of pornography. There can be no real transgression, just an image that repeats itself.
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.
I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.
I'll defend child pornography, how about that? What's wrong with seeing some child pornography? What if you watch child pornography because you find it hilarious? Then should it not a protected freedom of speech?
For example, I'm a great fan of pornography, but I don't see any reason not to restrict it so that people walking down the street who hate pornography don't have full color pictures outside of movie theaters. Let them be in a different district. I'm kidding about pornography, but you get the point.
The plague of pornography is swirling about us as never before. Pornography brings a vicious wake of immorality, broken homes, and broken lives. Pornography will sap spiritual strength to endure. Pornography is much like quicksand. You can become so easily trapped and overcome as soon as you step into it that you do not realize the severe danger. Most likely you will need assistance to get out of the quicksand of pornography. But how much better it is never to step into it. I plead with you to be careful and cautious.
I heard a statistic, and this one blew my mind, that 1 out of every 4 men in the church are involved in pornography. And yet, when was the last time you heard a pastor talk about pornography? ... Talk to people in law enforcement, and they will tell you that the great majority of sexual assaults were perpetrated by people that were looking at pornography and they wanted to make a reality what they were seeing in the pornography.
To define the era we live in is very difficult. How do we define it? We define it by music.
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