Arthur C Clarke

1:Magic is just science that we don't understand yet. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

2:It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
~ Arthur C Clarke,

3:The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

4:But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
~ Arthur C Clarke,

5:Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
~ Arthur C Clarke,

6:He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

7:Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

8:One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

9:Even on Earth, the first steps in this direction had been taken. There were millions of men, doomed in earlier ages, who now lived active and happy lives thanks to artificial limbs, kidneys, lungs, and hearts. To this process there could be only one conclusion - however far off it might be.

And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, It was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis.

But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men bad called "spirit."

And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

10:And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.

In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.

Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.

And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

11:At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.

So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.

Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Futilitarianism. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

2:Kalevala, whereas ~ Arthur C Clarke,

3:Adamski’s Disease. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

4:magnetohydrodynamic ~ Arthur C Clarke,

5:Minkowski spacetime. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

6:Call it the Star Gate. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

7:classical Hohmann orbit— ~ Arthur C Clarke,

8:are industrial accidents. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

9:Science demands patience. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

10:What are you doing, Dave? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

11:Einsteinian time dilation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

12:I’m only an ex-astronomer; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

13:L’audace—toujours l’audace! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

14:Open the pod bay doors, Hal. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

15:The greatest danger is panic ~ Arthur C Clarke,

16:..the happy hum of humanity. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

17:The timeless instant passed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

18:My God -- it's full of stars! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

19:Humor was the enemy of desire. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

20:Hal remained a low-grade moron. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

21:I HEAR YOU, FRANK. THIS IS DAVE. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

22:Religion is a byproduct of fear. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

23:throughout the flight, but there ~ Arthur C Clarke,

24:The cause of suffering is desire, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

25:As a matter of interest,” he said, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

26:Invade me now, my ruthless friend, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

27:The Ramans do everything in threes. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

28:El futuro no es ya lo que solía ser. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

29:Hal in full control of the ship. The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

30:Discovery was no longer a happy ship. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

31:Now I understand,” said the last man. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

32:While there was life, there was hope; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

33:For the last time, David Bowman slept. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

34:Guns are the crutches of the impotent. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

35:Work is the best remedy for any shock, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

36:When in doubt, say nothing and move on. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

37:years they had known less about it than ~ Arthur C Clarke,

38:You can’t have action without reaction. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

39:Science is the only religion of mankind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

40:Training was one thing, reality another. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

41:A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

42:a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

43:Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

44:For if not true, they are well imagined... ~ Arthur C Clarke,

45:If we are unable to download, remember us. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

46:Is there intelligent life on Earth? Yours, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

47:Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

48:The truth, as always, will be far stranger. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

49:...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

50:No trilogy should have more than four books. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

51:for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

52:I am the biggest anachronism on Planet Earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

53:Magic is just science we don't understand yet ~ Arthur C Clarke,

54:Odafenn szépen, sorban kialudtak a csillagok. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

55:My God -- it's full of stars!
-Dave Bowman. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

56:No one of intelligence resents the inevitable. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

57:no one of intelligence resents the inevitable. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

58:the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death…. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

59:The future is not to be forecast, but created. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

60:it was an accident—that had killed Frank Poole. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

61:God was just this black void that we cried into. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

62:If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

63:Magic is just science we haven't figured out yet ~ Arthur C Clarke,

64:...no on of intelligence resents the inevitable. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

65:Only small minds are impressed by large numbers. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

66:Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

67:The only real problem in life is what to do next. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

68:Magic's just science that we don't understand yet. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

69:The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

70:If children have interests, then education happens. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

71:If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

72:President of the Society for Creative Anachronisms. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

73:We can be sure of tale; We can only pray for genius ~ Arthur C Clarke,

74:Magic is just science that we don't understand yet. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

75:Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

76:I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

77:Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

78:We can be sure of talent; We can only pray for genius ~ Arthur C Clarke,

79:Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

80:forth in the equatorial plane were the brilliant stars ~ Arthur C Clarke,

81:I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

82:THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA (Theodore Gericault, 1791–1824) ~ Arthur C Clarke,

83:The French produce the best second-raters in the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

84:Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

85:It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

86:One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

87:The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

88:Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

89:if it really was brilliant I’d have thought of it already. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

90:…mysticism –perhaps the main aberration of the human mind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

91:Can you sum up your ideas in less than—oh, a thousand bits? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

92:The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play ~ Arthur C Clarke,

93:The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

94:They both knew, of course, that Hal was hearing every word, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

95:Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

96:In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

97:It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

98:a gentle tickling on Floyd’s wrist announced an incoming call. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

99:Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

100:Don’t believe anything I’ve told you—merely because I said it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

101:If he was indeed mad, his delusions were beautifully organized. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

102:No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

103:The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author ~ Arthur C Clarke,

104:When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

105:but all the world’s religions cannot be right, and they know it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

106:Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

107:The Opinions Expressed In This Book Are Not Those Of The Author. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

108:There could be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

109:When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

110:God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

111:History never repeats itself—but historical situations recur.” As ~ Arthur C Clarke,

112:It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

113:Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence ~ Arthur C Clarke,

114:They did not speak, for the words that were wanted did not exist. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

115:And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

116:He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

117:Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

118:any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

119:Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological ~ Arthur C Clarke,

120:Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

121:You are rather too fond of talking in riddles,’ complained Jeserac. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

122:excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

123:Hello, Dave,” said Hal presently. “Have you found the trouble?” This ~ Arthur C Clarke,

124:I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

125:I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

126:The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

127:An author should never turn down the opportunity for a new experience ~ Arthur C Clarke,

128:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

129:Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

130:Hal’s internal fault predictor could have made a mistake.” “It’s more ~ Arthur C Clarke,

131:In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

132:any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic. If ~ Arthur C Clarke,

133:Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

134:five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

135:Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

136:Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

137:When one has to ask, "Am I really in love?" the answer is always "No". ~ Arthur C Clarke,

138:Carente de contacto con el mundo exterior, era un universo en sí misma. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

139:Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

140:Lo que la naturaleza puede hacer, también el hombre lo hace, a su modo. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

141:The success of a science fiction writer is if he can write a good read. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

142:could one make up for lack of moral courage by proving physical bravery? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

143:Don't mess up the environment until you're quite sure what you're doing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

144:I've come a billion miles - I don't want to be stopped by the last sixty ~ Arthur C Clarke,

145:like everything that was worth doing, that would take time and practice. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

146:Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

147:One’s first existence was a precious gift which would never be repeated. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

148:Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of ~ Arthur C Clarke,

149:The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

150:The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

151:But there was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

152:How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

153:Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

154:The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

155:They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

156:This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger ~ Arthur C Clarke,

157:dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

158:He’s a creature of today—not haunted by the past or fearful of the future! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

159:Jan had always been a good pianist—and now he was the finest in the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

160:There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

161:This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

162:This would involve disconnection—the computer equivalent of death. Despite ~ Arthur C Clarke,

163:Toda tecnología lo suficientemente avanzada es indistinguible de la magia. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

164:was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

165:How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

166:Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

167:Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

168:If the present is shitty and the future is worse, the past is all you've got ~ Arthur C Clarke,

169:It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

170:Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

171:Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

172:Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

173:It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

174:I will not be afraid because I understand ... And understanding is happiness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

175:Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

176:The familiar can be as shocking as the strange—when it is in the wrong place. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

177:Until we get rid of religion, we won't be able to conduct the search for God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

178:What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy's point of view. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

179:Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.” There ~ Arthur C Clarke,

180:Nicole’s intuition told her not to follow the fireflies, but she said nothing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

181:The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

182:A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

183:Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

184:I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

185:One of the benefits of Dr. Kreuger’s eminence was an unlimited computer budget: ~ Arthur C Clarke,

186:Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

187:The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

188:Belief in God is apparently a psychological arti-fact of mammalian reproduction. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

189:but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as ~ Arthur C Clarke,

190:... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

191:Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

192:Pure coincidence, of course, but a sensible man makes coincidences work for him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

193:Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

194:. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

195:As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

196:It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

197:It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but ~ Arthur C Clarke,

198:Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

199:The human mind, somehow, seems much more attracted by the false than by the true; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

200:They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

201:Jede hinreichend fortschrittliche Technologie ist von Magie nicht zu unterscheiden ~ Arthur C Clarke,

202:Yet if there were no hazards there would be no achievement, no sense of adventure. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

203:After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

204:Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

205:He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

206:It may be that our role on this planet
is not to worship God--but to create him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

207:Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

208:The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

209:And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

210:Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use ~ Arthur C Clarke,

211:I’d hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

212:If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

213:It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
~ Arthur C Clarke,

214:It was idle to speculate, to build pyramids of surmise on a foundation of ignorance. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

215:The limits of possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

216:This is as bad as the Pandora party! It’s nothing less than interstellar xenophobia! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

217:It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

218:One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

219:Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

220:Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

221:Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

222:A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

223:... But for goodness sake, Frank— forget you're an engineer, and simply enjoy the view. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

224:For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

225:He was now probably the world’s leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

226:Historically, both fear and public opinion were notoriously unconcerned about morality. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

227:Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

228:The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible ~ Arthur C Clarke,

229:he filled to perfection the classic recipe for a small boy: “a noise surrounded by dirt. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

230:I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

231:Martin’s one of the nicest fellows you could meet, as long as you don’t do it too often. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

232:The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

233:had often been said that the only thing that could unite Mankind was a threat from space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

234:Perhaps no other year before or since 1984 has been awaited with such eager anticipation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

235:The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

236:Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

237:religion was the by-product of fear—a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

238:Theists believe there’s not more than one God; Deists that there is not less than one God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

239:...if one had to think about every footstep one took, ordinary walking would be impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

240:Nonsense,” he laughed. “It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s only a purr-pull peephole eater. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

241:throbbed into silence… “And that’s the way it was—goodbye, wonderful and terrible Twentieth ~ Arthur C Clarke,

242:No electronic computer can match the human brain at associating apparently irrelevant facts. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

243:Civilization and Religion are incompatible” and “Faith is believing what you know isn’t true. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

244:Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

245:First rule of government of the people, by the people, for the people: Never tell the people! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

246:The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion ~ Arthur C Clarke,

247:The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

248:We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

249:But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

250:Don’t blame me for what happened on Earth,” he said. “I’ve never been there, and I never will— ~ Arthur C Clarke,

251:Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

252:The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

253:The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

254:The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

255:The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

256:having something even bigger to worry about is perhaps the best cure for any insoluble problem. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

257:I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

258:I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

259:…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization… ~ Arthur C Clarke,

260:But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

261:Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

262:Evolution and science had come to the same answers; and the work of Nature had lasted longer. At ~ Arthur C Clarke,

263:man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

264:One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

265:A hundred failures would not matter, when a single success could change the destiny of the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

266:In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: “Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

267:In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

268:Otsusta minu üle mu tegude järgi, ehkki neid on vähe, mitte mu sõnade järgi, kuigi neid on palju. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

269:a man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

270:an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: “Wormholes in space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

271:Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

272:Nothing is deader than yesterday’s science-fiction— and Verne belongs to the day before yesterday. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

273:A hundred failures would not matter, when one single success could change the destiny of the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

274:I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

275:My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

276:Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

277:And as for you, Paul, I assured him that you could keep a secret for up to six days without apoplexy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

278:As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

279:The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

280:Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

281:Someone once said that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, attractive ... and wrong. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

282:But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.

The truth, as always, will be far stranger. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

283:But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger. A.C.C. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

284:for there was no vessel—at least of Man’s making—anywhere between her and the infinitely distant stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

285:I'm quite fond of the writer who told a beginning author, "If you've got a message, use Western Union." ~ Arthur C Clarke,

286:Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

287:My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

288:Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying ~ Arthur C Clarke,

289:We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return... ~ Arthur C Clarke,

290:all the world’s religions cannot be right, and they know it. Sooner or later man has to learn the truth: ~ Arthur C Clarke,

291:I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

292:It’s not any kind of rock—it crumbles when I touch it—I feel as if I’m exploring a giant Gruyère cheese… ~ Arthur C Clarke,

293:Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

294:One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

295:Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

296:Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

297:Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

298:We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... ~ Arthur C Clarke,

299:They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

300:Faith in one’s own destiny was among the most valuable of the gifts which the gods could bestow upon a man, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

301:Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell ~ Arthur C Clarke,

302:Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

303:Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

304:What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

305:but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

306:But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
~ Arthur C Clarke, #2index,

307:Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

308:He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it…. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

309:I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

310:Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

311:Ten kilometers away, the lights of New York glowed on the skyline like a dawn frozen in the act of breaking. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

312:The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

313:The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labour. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

314:The drought had lasted for 10 million years now, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

315:The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

316:Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

317:Democracy, frequently defined as “Individual greed, moderated by an efficient but not too zealous government. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

318:Myron, like countless NCO’s before him, had discovered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

319:He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder. The only thing he had never expected was the utterly commonplace. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

320:How I envy them,” said Colonel Jones. “Sometimes it’s quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

321:If we both believe that we have nothing to learn from the other, is it not obvious that we will both be wrong? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

322:News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

323:[...] parecía ahora desoladoramente primitiva ante los poderes que le estaban llevando a un inimaginable sino. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

324:There is something very strange about a universe where a few dead butterflies can balance a billion-ton tower. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

325:Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

326:All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

327:forty-one was a “very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

328:It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

329:The origin of the universe might be forever unknown, but all that had happened after obeyed the laws of physics ~ Arthur C Clarke,

330:ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

331:Do you believe in ghosts, Dim?” “Certainly not: but like every sensible man, I’m afraid of them. Why do you ask? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

332:The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

333:You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

334:Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

335:And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, “Good-bye. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

336:Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

337:It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

338:On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples: he shrank from diverting its course. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

339:The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

340:there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: “Where do we go from here? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

341:Few artists thrive in solitude, and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

342:He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder. The only thing he had never expected was the utterly commonplace. The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

343:But at least we have answered one ancient question. We are not alone. The stars will never again be the same to us. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

344:Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom. Perhaps ~ Arthur C Clarke,

345:I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

346:If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

347:We’re particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10—the first man-made object to escape from the Solar System. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

348:Cuando la belleza es universal pierde su poder de conmovernos, y sólo su falta logra producir algún efecto emocional. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

349:En ese momento, mientras su corazón anhelaba lo inalcanzable, tomó una decisión. Supo entonces qué haría con su vida. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

350:Hal (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

351:Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

352:The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

353:the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

354:The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

355:Desde el alba de los tiempos, aproximadamente cien mil millones de seres humanos han transitado por el planeta Tierra. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

356:Hogyan háborgathat bárki is egy két kilométer hosszú, fekete hasábot? És vajon milyen formában közölné a rosszallását? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

357:Man sank into a superstitious barbarism during which he distorted history to remove his sense of impotence and failure ~ Arthur C Clarke,

358:The fax machine now allows us to exchange ideas almost in real time; it’s far more convenient than the Electronic Mail ~ Arthur C Clarke,

359:Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

360:When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

361:Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

362:And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

363:[...] entre tandas de incierto dormitar y temerosa espera, estaban naciendo las pesadillas de generaciones aún por ser. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

364:Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

365:He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

366:like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

367:The ladies were quite uninterested; either because they did not care for mathematics, or preferred to ignore birthdays. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

368:Personally, I refuse to drive a car - I won't have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can't read. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

369:This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

370:You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

371:La única posibilidad de descubrir los límites de lo posible es aventurarse un poco más allá de ellos, hacia lo imposible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

372:Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

373:Curnow had once remarked that Dr. Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

374:Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

375:las palabras de mando eran inútiles, y los hombres, agarrados con todas sus fuerzas a las vergas mientras el barco danzaba ~ Arthur C Clarke,

376:There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

377:„Căci, deși era stăpânul lumii, nu era foarte sigur ce trebuia să facă în continuare, Dar avea el să se gândească la ceva”. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

378:I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

379:A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

380:Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

381:I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

382:Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

383:Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

384:Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous—merely undecided. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

385:The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

386:What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

387:Believe me, it gives us no pleasure to destroy men’s faiths, but all the world’s religions cannot be right, and they know it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

388:In Brohier’s eyes, violence was not merely the last refuge of the incompetent. It was the gloating revenge of the sore loser. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

389:Ja see, mõtles Alvin, mida ta nüüd nägi, ei olnud lihtsalt mälestus. See oli midagi keerukamat - see oli mäluseadme mälestus. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

390:Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

391:Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

392:aquellos fenomenales victorianos que a veces hacen a uno preguntarse si la raza humana no se habrá deteriorado desde entonces. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

393:Afrikaans is one of the world’s best languages in which to curse; even when spoken politely, it can bruise innocent bystanders. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

394:Beyond gravity, some of that freedom was regained; with the loss of weight went many of the cares and worries of Earth. Heywood ~ Arthur C Clarke,

395:Both times he had won through, but he knew well enough that any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

396:—Hay una regla que he intentado respetar toda mi vida: no pierdas nunca el sueño por problemas que no está en tu mano resolver. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

397:Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

398:Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
~ Arthur C Clarke,

399:And as for the Council—tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.’ The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

400:He was only aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

401:(Isn’t that human nature? Most of the time we want it to be better. When it’s as good as it can be, we want it to last forever), ~ Arthur C Clarke,

402:Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

403:The crisis was over. What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

404:The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

405:The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

406:Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

407:That’s still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you’re the only person who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

408:Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

409:Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men ~ Arthur C Clarke,

410:We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

411:When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

412:He had no wish to face whatever lurked in the unknown darkness, just beyond the little circle of light cast by the lamp of Science. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

413:Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

414:The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

415:The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

416:it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

417:Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

418:They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

419:They’d all been carefully screened by the F.B.I., so probably not more than half a dozen were active members of the Communist Party. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

420:The recipe for a long, happy life:
consult with old philosophers and young doctors,
consort with old friends and young women. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

421:As crianças crescem depressa neste ambiente de baixa gravidade. Mas não envelhecem na mesma proporção e assim viverão mais do que nós. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

422:Dmitri era uno de los mejores amigos de Floyd; y por esa misma razón, era la última persona con quien deseaba hablar en aquel momento. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

423:I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

424:No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

425:The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

426:Well, that’s a relief. You know that I have the greatest possible enthusiasm for this mission.” “I’m sure of it. Now please let me have ~ Arthur C Clarke,

427:All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

428:Richard turned to his portable computer and, working from notes, called up on the monitor a mass of numbers arrayed in rows and columns. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

429:There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

430:They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When ~ Arthur C Clarke,

431:who is better off, the child with a mentor who knows and tells everything or the one whose teacher helps the child find her own answers? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

432:Because politics is the science of the possible, it only appeals to second-rate minds. The first raters only interested in the impossible ~ Arthur C Clarke,

433:Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear—a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

434:How foolish that expectation had been! He knew now that one might as well hope to see the wind, or speculate about the true shape of fire. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

435:The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

436:Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

437:I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

438:No era el miedo a los abismos galácticos lo que helaba su alma, sino una más profunda inquietud, que brotaba desde el futuro aún por nacer. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

439:That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

440:There was awe, and there was also incredulity—sheer disbelief that the dead Moon, of all worlds, could have sprung this fantastic surprise. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

441:Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

442:Katılıyorum Tanya. Ama Haldane'in ünlü sözünü hatırla: Evren sadece hayal ettiğimizden daha garip değil; hayal edebileceğimizden daha garip. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

443:Now, what did “feel” really mean to a computer? Another very good question, but hardly one to be considered at that particular moment. Then, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

444:Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

445:There’s an ancient philosophical joke that’s much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

446:Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

447:Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

448:He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

449:SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

450:Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

451:All bureaucracies are the same. They drain the life out of the truly creative people and develop mindless paper-pushers as their critical mass. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

452:Yalnızca zamanın derman olabileceği bazı şeyler vardı hayatta. Kötüler yok edilebilirdi, ancak aklı karışmış iyi birine hiçbir şey yapılamazdı. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

453:I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

454:mystery was piling upon mystery, and that for all his efforts he was getting further and further from any understanding of the truths he sought. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

455:She should have won, but she didn’t. Her father had consoled her by telling Nicole that France was not ready for its heroines to have dark skin. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

456:That first Prime Monitor,” he said, “was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

457:The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon
it would lie outside the experience of all living men. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

458:There was no objection when he said: “I’m going after it.” Nor did he expect there to be; his life was now his own, to do with as he pleased. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

459:He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

460:It was such a nuisance that men were fundamentally polygamous. On the other hand, if they weren’t… Yes, perhaps it was better this way, after all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

461:I agree with you, Captain,” he whispered. “The human race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Hermians argue, survival is not everything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

462:Alvin is happy,’ Jeserac continued. ‘He has formed no real attachments, and it is hard to see how he can while he still suffers from this obsession. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

463:When you all have figgered out how to sail across space to our shores, you’ll find yourselves just as welcome as the people who come to your shores. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

464:Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

465:Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

466:Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

467:So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

468:The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

469:Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

470:As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

471:CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

472:The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

473:Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input. If they are deprived of it, the mind manufactures its own substitutes. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

474:Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism ~ Arthur C Clarke,

475:For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion–the cause of so much misery and so much poetry–that every man has only one real love in his life. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

476:I’m only an ex-astronomer; it’s years since I did any real research. Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

477:New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

478:Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

479:Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened ~ Arthur C Clarke,

480:Summer 2161: Brown, eleven, enrolled in Camp Longhorn by father over strenuous objections of mother. Typical outdoor summer camp in hill country of Texas ~ Arthur C Clarke,

481:The trouble with cliché's, some philosopher remarked, probably with a yawn, is that they are so boringly true. But "love at first sight" is never boring. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

482:They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

483:Ésa era la respuesta formal; después de escucharla con tanta frecuencia, perdía todo sentido, reducida a una secuencia de sonidos sin significado especial. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

484:I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don't have much intelligence. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

485:We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

486:It was secret that with greatest determination , was very hard to conceal - for it affected one's attitude, one's voice ,one's total outlook on the universe ~ Arthur C Clarke,

487:It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

488:The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

489:Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

490:Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

491:I thought this couldn’t happen in astronomy. Isn’t celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

492:La primera existencia era un precioso don que jamás se volvía a repetir. Era maravilloso contemplar la vida por primera vez, como en la frescura de la aurora. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

493:harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

494:He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. How did one annoy a two- kilometre-long black rectangular slab? And just what form would its disapproval take ~ Arthur C Clarke,

495:Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting ~ Arthur C Clarke,

496:Whatever godlike powers and principalaties lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important: Love and Death. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

497:Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

498:My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.

[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19] ~ Arthur C Clarke,

499:Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

500:After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

501:…A man may take one step ahead of his culture and chance being called a genius. But if he takes two steps, he is certain to be called a menace, a madman, a fool. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

502:It seemed to him that his ship was rather like a stranded whale that had managed a difficult birth in an alien element. He hoped that the new calf would survive. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

503:Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

504:[...] mundos que en cualquier otra parte hubiesen sido considerados como planetas por propio derecho, pero que allí eran simplemente satélites de un amo gigante. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

505:Otto would pull the trigger at the slightest provocation and you, Michael, would agonize aver its morality even if your life were threatened. I'm the tiebreaker. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

506:There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

507:all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

508:A thousand years in one body is long enough for any man; at the end of that time, his mind is clogged with memories, and he asks only for rest—or a new beginning. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

509:But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

510:But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…"

Childhood's End - Ch. 15 ~ Arthur C Clarke,

511:There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

512:Verdaderamente que esa palabra de "periódico" resultaba un anacrónico pegote en la era de la electrónica. El texto era puesto al momento automáticamente cada hora ~ Arthur C Clarke,

513:Whatever their origin, the human race was fortunate to have seen such a wonder; it could exist for only a brief moment of time in the history of the Solar System. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

514:With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while—perhaps as much as ten minutes—to locate the line in the whole body of English literature. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

515:Apart from this common Lassan tendency to procrastinate, Kumar’s chief defects were an adventurous nature and a fondness for sometimes risky practical jokes. This, ~ Arthur C Clarke,

516:It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

517:Then I remembered that these men didn’t seem any cleverer than I was; they were highly trained, that was all. If one worked hard enough, one could master anything. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

518:Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

519:No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

520:Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

521:Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

522:The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

523:We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

524:Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

525:He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

526:Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

527:science fiction is something that could happen—but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen—though often you only wish that it could. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

528:But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme.... ~ Arthur C Clarke,

529:My dear Rikki,” Karellen retorted, “it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

530:There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

531:Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

532:I am having difficulty in maintaining contact with Earth. The trouble is in the AE-35 unit. My Fault Prediction Center reports that it may fail within seventy-two hours. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

533:I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

534:If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

535:One hemisphere was a giant bull’s-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

536:There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

537:Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

538:Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr’s ‘Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true.’ If ~ Arthur C Clarke,

539:El anciano lo miraba con firmeza a través del abismo de los siglos; en sus palabras pesaba la inmensurable sabiduría de una larga vida en contacto con hombres y máquinas. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

540:He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

541:It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a living entity, localised in a single spot, though actually it was the sum total of all the machines in Diaspar. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

542:Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

543:The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

544:The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

545:Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

546:All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

547:Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

548:Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West’s Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

549:Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

550:The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well stocked mind is safe from boredom. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

551:Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?”

“Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

552:Las líneas borrosas y confusas, los colores inciertos y opacos demostraban que, si el artista no conocía su meta, las herramientas más milagrosas no eran capaces de lograrla. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

553:There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

554:he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout ~ Arthur C Clarke,

555:How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

556:Sometimes when I’m in a bookstore or a library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

557:Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. But it is too soon to judge
them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

558:Diga-me, você gostaria de ir para a Terra? Seus olhos arregalaram-se de espanto e ela negou resolutamente, sacudindo a cabeça. — É um lugar ruim. A gente se machuca quando cai. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

559:Even the few serious crimes that did occur received no particular attention in the news. For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

560:It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

561:It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

562:And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed ~ Arthur C Clarke,

563:At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

564: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

565:He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

566:I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

567:When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

568:It goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

569:Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air, and other expendables. But, of course, that’s just how the Earth operates—on a slightly larger scale. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

570:Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

571:And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

572:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

573:Miraculous though they were—perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that had produced them—they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

574:Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

575:All that we do know is this: you, Alvin, alone of the human race, have never lived before. In literal truth, you are the first child to be born on Earth for at least ten million years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

576:And then there came a sound which Moon-Watcher could not possibly have identified, for it had never been heard before in the history of the world. It was the clank of metal upon stone. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

577: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

578:If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

579:In my life I have found two things of priceless worth: learning and loving. Nothing else—not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake—can possibly have the same lasting value. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

580:One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

581:And Stormgren hoped that when Karellen was free to walk once more on Earth, he would one day come to these northern forests, and stand beside the grave of the first man to be his friend. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

582:Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

583:The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

584:You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness—only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

585:Half a dozen workmen, with an equal number of superchimp assistants, were busily laying the partly completed dance floor, while others were installing electric wiring and fixing furniture. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

586:He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in the moment of success, the stars—the aloof, indifferent stars—had come to him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

587:It still believed in everything that the Master had taught it; though it had seen him fake his miracles and tell lies to his followers, these inconvenient facts did not affect its loyalty. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

588:...science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

589:Greatness no longer matters. We see now that each human being who dies in the center of a universe: a unique spark of hope and despair, hate and love, going alone into the greater darkness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

590:Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

591:It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

592:Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

593:Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That’s why you need a captain. You can’t run a ship by a committee—at least not all the time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

594:My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.’ Bisesa studied him. ‘You’ll have to tell me about your father. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

595:The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

596:It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

597:(One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn’s, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.) ~ Arthur C Clarke,

598:The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

599:The manuals that Otto gave me said that you couldn’t hurt those things if you dropped them from the top of the Trump Tower. Besides,” he added, “they aren’t even armed yet. Right, Herr Admiral? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

600:This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

601:Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

602:I’m a tone-deaf siren, a wallflower at the mating dance. And I do wonder why men can’t want me for me. I’m smart, I don’t defer, and I didn’t put making babies number one on my list of priorities. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

603:[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

604:Trvalo několik tisíc let, než lidstvo přišlo na to, že existuje několik zaměstnání, která by neměli zastávat lidé, kteří se o ně dobrovolně hlásí, a obzváště tehdy, když projevují příšišné nadšení. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

605:Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

606:But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

607:Once, I believed that space could
have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s
handwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

608:Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

609:wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

610:E como, em toda a Galáxia, não encontraram nada mais precioso do que a Mente, incentivaram seu despertar em toda a parte. Tornaram-se fazendeiros nos campos de estrelas; plantavam, e às vezes colhiam. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

611:Now, at last, the Ramans’ strategy was obvious. They had come so close to the Sun merely to tap its energy at the source and to speed themselves even faster on the way to their ultimate, unknown goal. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

612:The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

613:The time has come,” said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, “to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

614:I seem to be having difficulty—my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.’” The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

615:It was a kind of basso-profundo flutter in which each individual vibration could be heard. And the modulation was itself modulated; it rose and fell, rose and fell, with a period of about five seconds. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

616:It was no use relying any further on logical arguments and the endless mapping of alternative futures. That way, one could go around in circles forever. The time had come to listen to his inner voices. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

617:You will find men like him in all the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

618:Instantly, there had been cries of protest from the industrial archaeologists, outraged at such vandalism, and from the naturalists, who pointed out that the penguins simply loved the abandoned pipeline. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

619:It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

620:My dear Rikki,” Karellen retorted, “it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!” Despite himself, Stormgren smiled. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

621:I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

622:I don’t believe all this just happened,” Nicole said. “Not on another planet. Not anywhere. Natural evolution simply does not result in the kind of interspecies harmony we have witnessed the last two days. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

623:I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course; chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

624:He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

625:you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

626: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

627:And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

628:And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of Love and Art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

629:People go through four stages before any revolutionary development: 1. It's nonsense, don't waste my time. 2. It's interesting, but not important. 3. I always said it was a good idea. 4. I thought of it first. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

630:There was a smell of nitric oxides as the air itself started to burn in the beam of the laser torch, and a steady sizzling as the fiery knife sliced towards secrets that had been hidden since the birth of man. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

631:I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

632:The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers - and thermonuclear weapons. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

633:The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications... ~ Arthur C Clarke,

634:It is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

635:It is vital to remember that information-- in the sense of raw data-- is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

636:Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

637:They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999—but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

638:But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

639:Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

640:(...) faktem było, iż cierpiał na nieuleczalną chorobę, która jak się wydawało, spośród wszystkich inteligentnych ras zamieszkujących wszechświat atakowała tylko gatunki homo sapiens. Tą chorobą była mania religijna. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

641:Y debido a que en toda la Galaxia no habían encontrado nada más precioso que la Mente, alentaron por doquiera su amanecer. Se convirtieron en granjeros en los campos de las estrellas; sembraron, y a veces cosecharon. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

642:Ya sé, desde luego, que la Atlántida de Platón nunca existió en realidad. Por esta misma razón, nunca podrá morir. Siempre será un ideal, un sueño de perfección , una meta que inspirará a los hombres en la posteridad. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

643:Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

644:Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity—or, at the worst, bad manners. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

645:Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal—and power. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

646:I only hope they don’t add, ‘This hurts us more than it hurts you’—though now that I think of it, that will be absolutely correct. We’ll never know a thing—but everyone else will feel guilty for the rest of their lives. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

647:One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

648:There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

649: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

650:Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

651:Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

652:Nothing in this scene will be changed by my death, Nicole thought. There will just be one less pair of eyes to observe its splendor. And one less collection of chemicals risen to consciousness to wonder what it all means. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

653:Tiempo atrás Norton había llegado a la convicción de que a algunas mujeres no debería permitírseles viajar en las naves espaciales; la ingravidez tenía efectos sobre sus senos que resultaban demasiado perturbadores.Ya era ~ Arthur C Clarke,

654:With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family. Like ~ Arthur C Clarke,

655:I’ve just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction—they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

656:At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton’s horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells’s “The Star.” He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

657:life was not a joyride at an amusement park. It was a deadly serious affair and only through a combination of solid values, self-control, and a steady commitment to a worthwhile goal was there a chance to achieve happiness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

658:Enjoy them while you may,” answered Rashaverak gently. “They will not be yours for long.” It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and a terror it had never held before. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

659:The crew of Apollo 8, who at Christmas, 1968, became the first men ever to set eyes upon the Lunar Farside, told me that they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large black monolith: alas, discretion prevailed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

660:Floyd made it a rule never to worry about events over which he could have absolutely no control; any external threat would reveal itself in due time and must be dealt with then. But he could not help wondering if they had done ~ Arthur C Clarke,

661:The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

662:Nevertheless, when you did not know what you were looking for, it was important to avoid all prejudices and preconceptions; something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

663:He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label—SPACETASTIES—was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: ‘Guaranteed crumbless’. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

664:Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

665:The room you are about to enter,” the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, “is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

666:Often we had no choice: we couldn’t reform the whole world. And didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

667:They no longer formed a single group, united in the common cause of survival. Now their lives had diverged into a score of independent aims and ambitions. Humanity had swallowed them up once more, as the ocean swallows a raindrop. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

668:The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him—but not to like him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

669:yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

670:However much the universe and its mysteries might call him, this was where he was born and where he belonged. It would never satisfy him, yet always he would return. He had gone half-way across the Galaxy to learn this simple truth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

671:Jean was definitely the girl who mattered, despite her queer ideas and queerer friends. He had no intention of totally abandoning Naomi or Joy or Elsa or—what was her name?—Denise; but the time had come for something more permanent. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

672:A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled—and this did nothing at all to help—a phrase he had once come across: “Someone is walking over your grave. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

673:Atheism is unprovable, so uninteresting. However unlikely it is, we can never be certain that God once existed—and has now shot off to infinity, where no one can ever find him… Like Gautama Buddha, I take no position on this subject. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

674:When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them—Io—is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

675:Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don’t age so quickly—they’ll live longer than we do.” Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the unusually delicate bone structure. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

676:Pero nadie pensaba que llegaría muy lejos, porque ni siquiera creo que fuera capaz de integrar e elevado a x.
- ¿Es posible tal ignorancia? - preguntó alguien con asombro.
- Puede que esté exagerando. Digamos x por e elevado a x. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

677:Don't forget, as you enjoy your mild spring days and peaceful summer evenings, how lucky you are to live in the temperate region of the Solar System, where the air never freezes and the rocks never melt... Earthlight by Arthur C. Clarke ~ Arthur C Clarke,

678:Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

679:Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

680:The gear that they were carrying looked very formidable, but though it was bulky it weighed practically nothing. It was all packed in gravity-polarising containers which neutralised its weight, leaving only inertia to be contended with. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

681:In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three] ~ Arthur C Clarke,

682:They no longer formed a single group, united in the common cause of survival. Now their lives had diverged again into a score of independent aims and ambitions. Humanity had swallowed them up once more, and the ocean swallows a raindrop. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

683:In less than two hours its direction of motion had swung through more than ninety degrees, and it had given a final, almost contemptuous proof of its total lack of interest in all the worlds whose peace of mind it had so rudely disturbed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

684:Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as "See--no weapons"? But no one could think of anything better. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

685:Wydaje mi się, że jedną z przyczyn, dla których uciekam w przyszłość, jest moja niecierpliwość. Chcę ujrzeć rezultaty tego, co zapoczątkowałeś, ale jednocześnie pragnę przeskoczyć etapy pośrednie, które jak podejrzewam, nie będą przyjemne. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

686:Yet among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question:
“Where do we go from here? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

687:Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

688:Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

689:Could we go into your room?" she asked. "I knew it. I knew it," he said, spinning around and sliding quickly toward his door. "It's finally happend, just like in dreams. An intelligent, beautiful woman is going to declare her undying affection ~ Arthur C Clarke,

690:'The Devil in the Dark' impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

691:We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

692:Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

693:Ladies and gentlemen, those flames from the port engines are perfectly normal. The stewardess will be coming around in a moment to serve coffee, tea, or milk. I’m sorry we don’t have anything stronger on this flight—regulations don’t permit it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

694:Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

695:Well, I guess [2001: A Space Odyssey] legitimized [science fiction], particularly for people who looked down on science fiction; you know, the intelligentsia. My definition of the intelligentsia: someone who's educated beyond their intelligence. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

696:We obtained another guinea pig, chloroformed it, and sent it through the transmitter. To our delight, it revived. We immediately had it killed and stuffed for the benefit of posterity. You can see it in the museum with the rest of our apparatus. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

697:Yet there was also something slightly spooky about them. Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Cosmo Christers state as incontrovertible fact. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

698:In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best
science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction
writer.
[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three] ~ Arthur C Clarke,

699:We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

700:One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

701:The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

702:the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

703:When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

704:And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

705:New knowledge—new wisdom—in realms we have never dreamed of before. It may lure us away from the dangers we have encountered: for certainly nothing we can learn from Nature will ever be as great a threat as the peril we have uncovered in our own minds. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

706:["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

707:This implies, of course, the development of a really compact and light-weight method of storing or producing electricity, at least an order of magnitude better than our present clumsy batteries. Such an invention has been overdue for about fifty years; ~ Arthur C Clarke,

708:The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

709:He was alone in an airless, partially disabled ship, all communication with Earth cut off. There was not another human being within half a billion miles. And yet, in one very real sense, he was not alone. Before he could be safe, he must be lonelier still. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

710:I agree that was terrible—but what could my government do about it?” “A great deal—if it wished. But that would have offended the people who supplied it with oil—and bought its weapons, like the land mines that killed and maimed civilians by the thousands. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

711:A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

712:As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now certain, even though all else was mystery. There were no jets of gas, no beams of ions or plasma thrusting Rama into its new orbit. No one put it better than Sergeant Professor Myron, when he said, in shocked ~ Arthur C Clarke,

713:The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

714:He pressed the button, and waited. Several minutes later, a metal arm moved out from the bunk, and a plastic nipple descended toward his lips. He sucked on it eagerly, and a warm, sweet fluid coursed down his throat, bringing renewed strength with every drop. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

715:A major part of his job was deciding when warnings could be ignored, when they could be dealt with at leisure—and when they had to be treated as real emergencies. If he paid equal attention to all the ship’s cries for help, he would never get anything done. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

716:I'm sure we would not have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books ~ Arthur C Clarke,

717:fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

718:He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart. No one had really lived until they had achieved that synthesis of love and desire which he had never dreamed existed until he came to Lys. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

719:He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

720:I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

721:A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

722:No one worried except a few philosophers. The race was too intent upon savoring its new-found freedom to look beyond the pleasures of the present. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom. Perhaps ~ Arthur C Clarke,

723:In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

724:Nowhere in Rama had there been any trace of artistic expression; everything was purely functional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

725:We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

726:And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis…. But ~ Arthur C Clarke,

727:If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.' ~ Arthur C Clarke,

728:Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

729:What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

730:There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

731:I should have known that a man can receive only what his mind has been prepared to receive, that all else is ignored, or interpreted to suit his prior interpretation—that man can only accept change through it being interpreted as no change, or not knowing it is change. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

732:It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings. Alan Bishop ~ Arthur C Clarke,

733:No need to go to the dolphins,” interjected Max Brailovsky. “One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he’d won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

734:There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

735:It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings.

Alan Bishop ~ Arthur C Clarke,

736:'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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

737:His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People—particularly older ones—still spoke of putting film into a camera, or gas into a car. Even the phrase “cutting a tape” was still sometimes heard in recording studios—though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

738:In particular, as was pointed out by Isaacs et al. almost a hundred years ago (see Science, Vol. 151, pp. 682–83, 1966), diamond is the only construction material which would make possible the so-called space elevator, allowing transportation away from Earth at negligible cost. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

739:It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

740:And even if it never makes it to the big screen, millions of people have watched a very impressive version of the opening in the box office hit Independence Day. So when/if Childhood’s End is finally made into a movie, the popcorn set will undoubtedly think we’ve ripped off I.D. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

741:Hilvar knew better than this; he had sensed it instinctively from the first. Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest. What ~ Arthur C Clarke,

742:If the decades and the centuries pass with no indication that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the long-term effects on human philosophy will be profound, and may be disastrous. Better to have neighbors we don’t like than to be utterly alone. —Arthur C. Clarke ~ Arthur C Clarke,

743:It’ll be symbolic. Let the women dress the way savages dress everywhere—bedeck themselves in old dead parts of birds and animals, smear their faces with colored clay, mash flowers over themselves to conceal their natural stench. The same way they always dress. Now, for Chrissake! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

744:Dr. C. informs me that, in technical terminology, Hal became trapped in a Hofstadter–Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

745:I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

746:Jealousy is a terrible thing. “It doth mock the meat it feeds upon” is an understatement. Jealousy is completely consuming, totally irrational, and absolutely debilitating. The most wonderful people in the world are nothing but raging animals when trapped in the throes of jealousy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

747:The Dean’s complaining to his Faculty. “Why do you scientists need such expensive equipment? Why can’t you be like the Math Department, which only needs a blackboard and a wastepaper basket? Better still, like the Department of Philosophy. That doesn’t even need a wastepaper basket… ~ Arthur C Clarke,

748:There was the airfield that had a railway line crossing the main runway, and operated through a kind of nonaggression pact between the Flying Control Tower and the nearest stationmaster. When a train was scheduled to go through, no aircraft were allowed to interfere, and vice versa. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

749:It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it. There ~ Arthur C Clarke,

750:The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

751:They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen’s ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

752:In Lys, it seemed, all love began with mental contact, and it might be months or years before a couple actually met. In this way, Hilvar explained, there could be no false impressions, no deceptions, on either side. Two people whose minds were open to one another could hide no secrets. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

753:Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

754:Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

755:Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

756:Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

757:Even on Earth, the first steps in this direction had been taken. There were millions of men, doomed in earlier ages, who now lived active and happy lives thanks to artificial limbs, kidneys, lungs, and hearts. To this process there could be only one conclusion—however far off it might be. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

758:No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

759:Norton tightened his arms around her. One of the nicest things about weightlessness, he often thought, was that you could really hold someone all night, without cutting off the circulation. There were those who claimed that love at one gee was so ponderous that they could no longer enjoy it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

760:Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!" ~ Arthur C Clarke,

761:I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

762:. . . 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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

763:Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945) ~ Arthur C Clarke,

764:I'm surprised at some technological development, and the realization that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think the CD-ROM is the best example of that. The idea of having a whole symphony, or opera, or novel in a little piece of plastic is pretty amazing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

765:Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness—the world of the desert—the world of the Invaders. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

766:a real danger by giving it an absurd name, the designations were often facetious: the Godel Gremlin, the Mandelbrot Maze, the Combinatorial Catastrophe, the Transfinite Trap, the Conway Conundrum, the Turing Torpedo, the Lorenz Labyrinth, the Boolean Bomb, the Shannon Snare, the Cantor Cataclysm… ~ Arthur C Clarke,

767:No closed ecology can be one-hundred-per-cent efficient; there is always waste, loss—some degradation of the environment and build-up of pollutants. It may take billions of years to poison and wear out a planet, but it will happen in the end. The oceans will dry up; the atmosphere will leak away. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

768:The men and women aboard Goliath watched with concern and compassion, yet with a sense of detachment, almost as if they were looking at events that already belonged to the distant past. Whatever happened to Earth, they knew that they would presently go their separate ways on their various worlds— ~ Arthur C Clarke,

769:This was the fundamental problem with rockets—and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

770:The universe is in constant renewal,” she said, as much to herself as to Ellie. “Everything—individuals, planets, stars, even galaxies—has a life cycle, a death as well as a birth. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the universe itself. Change and renewal are an essential part of the overall process. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

771:The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was brief and stormy. Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

772:There’s a passage about ‘rivers of molten rock that wound their way… until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.’ That’s a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

773:Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but the individuality would have gone ~ Arthur C Clarke,

774:The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

775:A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

776:Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. But however far they travel from their native world, human beings can never escape the diurnal rhythm, set ages ago by its cycle of light and darkness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

777:There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

778:Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness—the world of the desert—the world of the Invaders. Alvin ~ Arthur C Clarke,

779:To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

780:when a man sells his independence of thought for money or status, without realizing it he also sells his capacity for independence of thought; and, like the worn-out columnists and commentators, he must play the same old record over and over, because he has no capacity for taking a fresh point of view. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

781:This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, 'Mere dead matter' was one of their favourite phrases. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

782:Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

783: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

784:You cannot reason with a rifle bullet fired from across the battlefield. You cannot negotiate with an artillery shell lobbed from over the horizon. You cannot compromise with a nuclear warhead screaming in from half a world away. The only answer to the gun, the only defense for the gun, has been more guns. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

785:If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble... But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

786:He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes overwhelmed with despair. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

787:Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service—in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It ~ Arthur C Clarke,

788:They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

789:Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to—ugh—eat them became economically impossible. I don’t know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants it produced. And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

790: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

791:Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

792:He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

793:Here was the same sense of awe and mystery, and the sadness of the irrevocably vanished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater, both in time and in space, that the mind was unable to do it justice; after a while, it ceased to respond. Norton wondered if, sooner of later, he would take even Rama for granted. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

794:Quando aquele mar de fogo se expandiu abaixo dele, Bowman devia ter sentido medo, mas, curiosamente, agora sentia apenas uma ligeira apreensão. Não que sua mente estivesse entorpecida de maravilhas. A lógica lhe dizia que ele certamente estava sob a proteção de alguma inteligência controladora e quase onipotente. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

795:A fin-de-siècle philosopher had once remarked—and been roundly denounced for his pains—that Walter Elias Disney had contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history. Now, half a century after the artist’s death, his dreams were still proliferating across the Florida landscape. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

796:humans who have lived through the singular experience of parenting without being irrevocably changed by the process. We all wonder, as our children grow into adults, what we have done, or not done, that has contributed to, or detracted from, the happiness of these special beings we have brought into existence. The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

797:…Oh yes, we once tried to put this thick catsup in a wide-mouth bottle so it would pour easily, and the company almost went broke—the American housewife refused to touch it because the shape of the container had been changed. It has taken us fifteen years to enlarge the neck of the bottle by one quarter of an inch. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

798:You know why Wainwright and his kind fear me, don't you?.. They fear that we know the truth about the origins of their faiths. How long, they wonder, have we been observing humanity? Have we watched Mohammad begin the hegira, or Moses giving the Jews their law? Do we know all the false in their stories they believe? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

799:In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

800:The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

801:Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

802:Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

803: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

804:Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

805:Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that COULD happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that COULDN'T happen - though often you only wish that it could. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

806:there’s something fundamentally wrong with the wiring of our brains, which makes us incapable of consistent logical thinking. To make matters worse, though all creatures need a certain amount of aggressiveness to survive, we seem to have far more than is absolutely necessary. And no other animal tortures its fellows as we do. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

807:They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

808:For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

809: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

810:The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium—the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

811:Quando a era do gelo terminou, muitas coisas da vida primitiva do planeta também haviam terminado— inclusive os homens-macaco. Mas estes, diferentes de outros animais, tinham deixado descendentes. Não haviam sido simplesmente extintos, mas sim transformados. Os criadores de instrumentos foram recriados por seus próprios instrumentos. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

812:Well, Io is Mordor: Look up Part Three. There’s a passage about ‘rivers of molten rock that wound their way… until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.’ That’s a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

813:That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him—or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it—but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

814:The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

815:Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people, he was so unaccountable a creature that they sometimes forgot that he still shared their emotions. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

816:One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

817:Allá lejos estaban las montañas, donde moraban el poder y la belleza, donde el trueno sonaba alegremente por encima de los hielos y el aire era claro y penetrante. Allá, cuando la Tierra ya estaba envuelta en sombras, brillaba todavía el sol, transfigurando las cimas. Y ellos sólo podían observar y maravillarse. Nunca escalarían esas alturas. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

818:Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here they had been turned to the purposes of peace. After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

819:Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

820:My colleagues and I, Dr. Floyd, will stake our reputations on this. TMA-1 has nothing to do with the Chinese. Indeed, it has nothing to do with the human race—for when it was buried, there were no humans. “You see, it is approximately three million years old. What you are now looking at is the first evidence of intelligent life beyond the Earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

821:The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether ~ Arthur C Clarke,

822:Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine—whether by typewriter or microphones was immaterial—without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease. The ~ Arthur C Clarke,

823:You will find men like him in all the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

824:He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

825: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

826:THERE IS A special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends. Alvin knew that sadness as he wandered alone through the forests and fields of Lys. Not even Hilvar accompanied him, for there are times when a man must be apart even from his closest friends. He ~ Arthur C Clarke,

827:This touch of luxury was typical of the Base, though it was sometimes hard to explain its necessity to the folk back on Earth. Every man and woman in Clavius had cost a hundred thousand dollars in training and transport and housing; it was worth a little extra to maintain their peace of mind. This was not art for art’s sake, but art for the sake of sanity. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

828:We have had our failures.” Yes, Karellen, that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

829:I don't think there are any secrets to writing in the - everybody has their own techniques. You must be widely read, that's one thing, because you have to resolve a tremendous amount of background information. Also, you should know what the competition is writing, just so you're not wasting your time doing the same thing. Unless you do it better, of course. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

830:Does it not seem strange to you, began Yarlan Zey, that though the skies are open to us, we have tried to bury ourselves in the Earth? It is the beginning of the sickness whose ending you have seen in your age. Humanity is trying to hide; it is frightened of what lies out there in space, and soon it will have closed all the doors that lead into the Universe. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

831:Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

832:No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

833:Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color—the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets—of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

834:One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

835:No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart. Jan ~ Arthur C Clarke,

836:1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

837:The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

838:The suggestion that the cores of the gas giants might consist of diamond was first made by Marvin Ross of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a classic paper “The ice layer in Uranus and Neptune—diamonds in the sky?” (Nature, Vol. 292, No. 5822, pp. 435–36, July 30, 1981.) Surprisingly, Ross did not extend his calculations to Jupiter. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

839:I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

840:Para todos os outros olhos, Saturno sempre havia mostrado todo o seu disco iluminado, inteiramente virado para o Sol. Agora ele era um arco delicado, com os anéis formando uma linha fina que o cortava - como uma flecha prestes a ser disparada, na face do próprio Sol.
Também na linha dos anéis estava a estrela brilhante de Titã, e às fagulhas mais fracas das outras luas. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

841:The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

842:When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

843:1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

844:Oh, I can think of many reasons. Perhaps it’s a signal, so that any strange ship entering our universe will know where to look for life. Perhaps it marks the centre of galactic administration. Or perhaps—and somehow I feel that this is the real explanation—it’s simply the greatest of all works of art. But it’s foolish to speculate now. In a few hours we shall know the truth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

845:Finding intelligent life would encourage people and also of course the opportunity of learning a tremendous amount, but this is a danger. We might be so overwhelmed with knowledge and information, that we might be depressed or even become suicidal - because what's the point if they're thousands of years ahead of us? Why should we bother? - or become the ultimate couch potatoes. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

846:To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most - that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a - placid, peaceful one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

847:There were, however, a few exceptions.
One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

848:It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

849:For it was their world, not Man’s. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

850:there’s something fundamentally wrong with the wiring of our brains, which makes us incapable of consistent logical thinking. To make matters worse, though all creatures need a certain amount of aggressiveness to survive, we seem to have far more than is absolutely necessary. And no other animal tortures its fellows as we do. Is this an evolutionary accident—a piece of genetic bad luck? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

851:During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

852:the very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns. If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations. It was a slow, tedious business, but the crystal monolith was patient. Neither it, nor its replicas scattered across half the globe, expected to succeed with all the scores of groups involved in the experiment. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

853:It will be possible in a few more years to build radio controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the Earth. A little later, manned rockets will be able to make similar flights with sufficient excess power to break the orbit and return to Earth. (1945) [Predicting communications satellites.] ~ Arthur C Clarke,

854:The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented—sometimes, indeed, unhealthy—boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole—or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

855:To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most — that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias — 1984, as an example. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a — placid, peaceful one. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

856:Why should I be? Nothing I have seen here in New Eden or on Earth suggests to me that humanity is capable of achieving harmony in its relationship with itself, much less with any other living creatures. Occasionally there is an individual, or even a group, that is able to transcend the basic genetic and environmental drawbacks of the species . . . But these people are miracles, certainly not the norm. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

857:Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

858:Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word newspaper, of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) ~ Arthur C Clarke,

859:No group can survive, let alone thrive, unless what is good for the overall community is more important than individual freedom. Take, for example, resource allocation. How can anyone with any intelligence possibly justify, in terms of the overall community, the accumulation and hoarding of enormous material assets by a few individuals when others do not even have food, clothing, and other essentials?” In ~ Arthur C Clarke,

860:There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

861:Agora, eles eram os senhores da Galáxia, e além do alcance do tempo. Podiam perambular à vontade por entre as estrelas, e afundar como uma névoa sutil através dos próprios interstícios do espaço. Mas, apesar de seus poderes divinos, não haviam esquecido completamente sua origem, na gosma quente de um mar desaparecido.
E ainda cuidavam das experiências que seus ancestrais haviam iniciado há tanto tempo. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

862:Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

863:But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

864: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? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

865: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

866:De algum modo, não estava nem um pouco surpreso, nem alarmado. Pelo contrário, tinha uma sensação de expectativa tranquila, como sentirá quando os médicos espaciais lhe haviam aplicado testes com drogas alucinógenas. O mundo ao seu redor era estranho e maravilhoso, mas não havia nada a temer. Ele viajara aqueles milhões de quilômetros em busca de mistério; e agora, ao que parecia, o mistério vinha em sua direção. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

867:Moon-Watcher and his companions had no recollection of what they had seen, after the crystal had ceased to cast its hypnotic spell over their minds and to experiment with their bodies. The next day, as they went out to forage, they passed it with scarcely a second thought; it was now part of the disregarded background of their lives. They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

868:Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

869:The outermost—Jupiter XXVII—moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

870:ne of the most noticeable changes had been a slowing down of the mad tempo that had so characterized the twentieth century. Life was more leisurely than it had been for generations. It therefore had less zest for the few, but more tranquility for the many. Western man had relearned what the rest of the world had never forgotten; That there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

871:There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

872:Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and It. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

873:In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And ~ Arthur C Clarke,

874:But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography—much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

875:They had forgotten much, but they did not know it. They were as perfectly fitted to their environment as it was to them—for both had been designed together. What was beyond the walls of the city was no concern of theirs; it was something that had been shut out of their minds. Diaspar was all that existed, all that they needed, all that they could imagine. It mattered nothing to them that Man had once possessed the stars. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

876:The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. “If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

877:Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

878: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

879:Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it - for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

880:A precondition for being a science fiction writer other than an interest in the future is that, an interest - at least an understanding of science, not necessarily a science degree but you must have a feeling for the science and its possibilities and its impossibilities, otherwise you're writing fantasy. Now, fantasy is also fine, but there is a distinction, although no one's ever been able to say just where the dividing lines come. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

881:The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. From ~ Arthur C Clarke,

882:I hope you’re right. Apart from that, won’t there be trouble when he discovers what you’re trying to do? Because he will, you know.” “I’ll take that risk. Besides, we understand each other rather well.” The physicist toyed with his pencil and stared into space for a while. “It’s a very pretty problem. I like it,” he said simply. Then he dived into a drawer and produced an enormous writing pad, quite the biggest that Stormgren had ever seen. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

883:It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers a second. Anything like a regular schedule is out of the question; there are times when one must forget the whole idea and stay in port—or at least in orbit—waiting for the Solar System to rearrange itself for the greater convenience of Mankind. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

884:Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. They pointed out that Discovery, the fastest ship ever designed, would take twenty thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri — and millions of years to travel any appreciable distance across the Galaxy. Even if, during the centuries to come, propulsion systems improved out of all recognition, in the end they would meet the impassable barrier of the speed of light, which no material object could exceed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

885:One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

886:Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

887:Even after a lifetime, one never grew wholly accustomed to the complete absence of time-lag when an information machine replied to an ordinary question. There were people who knew—or claimed to know—how it was done, and talked learnedly of ‘access time’ and ‘storage space’, but that made the final result none the less marvellous. Any question of a purely factual nature, within the city’s truly enormous range of available information, could be answered immediately. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

888:She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it’s not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

889:You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

890:In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

891:He lifted the telephone receiver and pressed it against the plastic of his helmet. If there had been a dialing sound he could have heard it through the conducting material. But, as he had expected, there was only silence. So—it was all a fake, though a fantastically careful one. And it was clearly not intended to deceive but rather—he hoped—to reassure. That was a very comforting thought; nevertheless he would not remove his suit until he had completed his voyage of exploration. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

892:Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

893:At some signal, floodlights around the lip of the crater were switched on, and the bright earthlight was obliterated by a far more brilliant glare. In the lunar vacuum the beams were, of course, completely invisible; they formed overlapping ellipses of blinding white, centered on the monolith. And where they touched it, its ebon surface seemed to swallow them. Pandora’s box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding—waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

894: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

895:the selection panels had thrown away the Veda, the Bible, the Tripitaka, the Qur’an, and all the immense body of literature—fiction and nonfiction—that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

896: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] ~ Arthur C Clarke,

897:Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

898:Seems like it,” answered Bowman. “The unit checks out perfectly. Even under two hundred percent overload, there’s no fault prediction indicated.” The two men were standing in the tiny workshop-cum-lab in the carrousel, which was more convenient than the space-pod garage for minor repairs and examinations. There was no danger, here, of meeting blobs of hot solder drifting down the breeze, or of completely losing small items of equipment that had decided to go into orbit. Such things could—and did—happen in ~ Arthur C Clarke,

899:But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

900:And even if Einstein could not be defied, he might be evaded. Those who sponsored this view talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyperspacial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: “Wormholes in space.” Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr’s “Your theory is crazy—but not crazy enough to be true.” If ~ Arthur C Clarke,

901:And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

902:There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone homes that Nature had given them, and which doomed them to inevitable death. They would replace their natural bodies as they wore out—or perhaps even before that—by constructions of metal and plastic, and would thus achieve immortality. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

903:It had been virtually shattered by two inventions, which were, ironically enough, of purely human origin and owed nothing to the Overlords. The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the second was an equally infallible method—as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood—of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

904:I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

905:That requires as much power as a small radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as a dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

906:Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

907:There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. From ~ Arthur C Clarke,

908:He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in the moment of success, the stars—the aloof, indifferent stars—had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold’s brain: The human race was no longer alone. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

909:la población mundial había alcanzado ya la cifra de seis mil millones... el tercio de ellos en China. En algunas sociedades autoritarias hasta habían sido decretadas leyes limitando la familia a dos hijos, pero se había mostrado impracticable su cumplimiento. Como resultado de todo ello, la alimentación era escasa en todos los países; hasta los Estados Unidos tenían días sin carne, y se predecía una carestía extendida para dentro de quince años, a pesar de los heroicos esfuerzos para explotar los mares y desarrollar alimentos sintéticos ~ Arthur C Clarke,

910:Invade me now, my ruthless friend, And make me cower in the dark. Remind me that I’m all alone And draw upon my face your mark. How is it that you capture me, When all my thoughts deny your force? Is it the reptile in my brain That lets your terror run its course? Baseless Fear undoes us all Despite our quest for lofty goals. We would-be Galahads don’t die, Fear just freezes all our souls. It keeps us mute when feeling love, Reminding us what we might lose. And if by chance we meet success, Fear tells us which safe route to choose. Nicole ~ Arthur C Clarke,

911:Goddamn it, he’d missed his cue. He should have set up a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. He should have manufactured some victims for the majority to persecute. Hell, that was the simplest formula in the book. The stupidest mayor of a stinking country town knew that one. Some blacks here, some Jews there, Catholics here, Protestants there, Irishmen, Swedes, Polacks, commies and homosexuals everywhere. Hell, with just a little twist of words, any and all of these could be made to look responsible for the Black Fleet. It always worked. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

912:Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

913:He knew damn well that humans would never go out and tackle anything stronger than they were. They had to feel they were in the majority; they had to feel that the opinion of the majority was behind them—no matter what hypocritical false front they put on for public consumption—before they would dare to stand up and be counted. Oh they were strong on crusading for perfectly safe subjects, these humans; but they had to have something weak and running in fear before they’d change over from rabbits to dogs and run baying after it in furious, frenzied chase. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

914:Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

915:Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation. If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd that people everyone would laugh him to scorn. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

916:You see,” he said, “this little gadget is only a simple-minded cousin of Karl’s—and look what it’s done already. All these machines are beginning to make us look fools. Before long they’ll start to disobey us without any Milquetoast interfering with their circuits. And then they’ll start ordering us about—they’re logical, after all, and won’t stand any nonsense.” He sighed. “When that happens, there won’t be a thing we can do about it. We’ll just have to say to the dinosaurs: ‘Move over a bit—here comes homo sap!’ And the transistor shall inherit the earth. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

917:Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the
Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be
interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive -by crossing space and so
escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet,
sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy
and the last choice between life and death." (do conto The Sentinel) ~ Arthur C Clarke,

918:Here was a revelation which no one could doubt or deny; here, seen by unknown magic of Overlord science, were the true beginnings of all the world's great faiths. Most of them were noble and inspiring, but that was not enough. Within a few days, all mankind's multitudinous messaihs had lost their divinity. Beneath the fierce and passionless light of truth, faiths that had sustained millions for twice a thousand years vanished like morning dew. All the good and all the evil they had wrought were swept suddenly into the past, and could touch the minds of men no more. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

919: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. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

920:Imagine that you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands—no, by now millions—of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there’s a ninety-nine percent overlap, the remaining one percent’s enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. “How to account for such irrational behavior? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

921:So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers. But their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear power plant and plasma drive and hydroponic farm. The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

922:When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

923:The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

924:Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

925:But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the flat Florida landscape—the multiple rails of a giant launching track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of perspective, brought on by his swift changes of speed and height, it seemed to Floyd that he was looking down on a small silver moth, caught in the beam of a flashlight. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

926:So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.

Yet it was fitting: it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its immensity, and knew now that it was no place for man. He realized at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that lured him to the stars.

For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

927:There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges – absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the ~ Arthur C Clarke,

928:For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

929:Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

930:A seis millones de kilómetros, más allá de la órbita de Plutón, Karellen se sentó ante una pantalla oscurecida. Nada faltaba en el informe; la misión había terminado. Volvía a su hogar después de tanto tiempo. El peso de los siglos había caído sobre él junto con una tristeza que ninguna lógica podía vencer. No lloraba el destino del hombre: estaba apenado por su propia raza, alejada para siempre de la grandeza por fuerzas insuperables. A pesar de todas sus hazañas, a pesar de dominar todo el universo físico, el pueblo de Karellen no era mejor que una tribu que se hubiese pasado toda la vida en una llanura chata y polvorienta. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

931:One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen, and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

932:Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that existed before the coming of the overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism, perhaps the most peculiar of all religions, still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly. With the rise of education, they had already been slowly dissolving, but for a while the Overlords had taken no sides in the matter. Though Karellen was often asked to express his views on religion, all that he would say was that a man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

933:electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar-system distances. Some elder statesmen, accustomed to the instantaneous communications that Earth had long taken for granted, had never reconciled themselves to the fact that radio waves took minutes, or even hours, to journey across the gulfs between the planets. “Can’t you scientists do something about it?” they had been heard to complain bitterly when told that immediate face-to-face conversation was impossible between Earth and any of its remoter children. Only the Moon had the barely acceptable one-and-a-half-second delay—with all the political and psychological consequences that implied. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

934:There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

935:In some ways,” admitted the Overlord gravely. “In others perhaps a better analogy can be found in the history of your colonial powers. The Roman and British Empires, for that reason, have always been of considerable interest to us. The case of India is particularly instructive. The main difference between us and the British in India was that they had no real motives for going there—no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and temporary ones as trade or hostility to other European powers. They found themselves possessors of an empire before they knew what to do with it, and were never really happy until they had got rid of it again. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

936:There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges – absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

937:And yet, even while they baffled him, they aroused within his heart a feeling he had never known before. When- which was not often, but sometimes happened- they burst into tears of utter frustration or despair, their tiny disappointments seemed to him more tragic than Man’s long retreat after the loss of his Galactic Empire. That was something too huge and remote for comprehension, but the weeping of a child could pierce one to the heart.
Alvin had met love in Diaspar, but now he was learning something equally precious, and without which love itself could never reach its highest fulfillment but must remain forever incomplete. He was learning tenderness. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

938:a new Astronomer Royal arrived in England to take up his appointment. The Press asked him to give his views on space-flight, and after two decades Dr Richard van der Riet Woolley had seen no reason to change his mind. ‘Space travel,’ he snorted, ‘is utter bilge.’ The newspapers did not allow him to forget this when Sputnik I went up the very next year. Later – irony piled upon irony – Dr Woolley became, by virtue of his position as Astronomer Royal, a leading member of the committee advising the British government on space-research. The feelings of those who have been trying, for a generation, to get the United Kingdom interested in space can well be imagined.* ~ Arthur C Clarke,

939:But to Vasili, for a moment that would be imprinted on his memory forever, that sharp-edged outline held a completely different, and wholly impossible, scene. It was as if a window had suddenly been opened onto another universe.
The vision lasted for less that a second, before his involuntary blink reflex cut it off. He was looking into a field not of stars, but of suns, as if into the crowded heart of a galaxy, or the core of a globular cluster. In that moment, Vasili Orlov lost forever the skies of Earth. From now on they would seem intolerably empty; even mighty Orion and glorious Scorpio would be scarcely noticeable patterns of feeble sparks, not worthy of a second glance. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

940:Manual control, please.”

“Are you sure, Frank?”

“Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you.”

Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simpleminded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides ('How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings'; 'Artificial Intelligence -- Real Irritation' were some of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

941:Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow—incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun. Dying? No—that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

942:Jupiter's fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.

Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

943:Since the first satellites had been orbited, almost fifty years earlier, trillions and quadrillions of pulses of information had been pouring down from space, to be stored against the day when they might contribute to the advance of knowledge. Only a minute fraction of all this raw material would ever be processed; but there was no way of telling what observation some scientist might wish to consult, ten, or fifty, or a hundred years from now. So everything had to be kept on file, stacked in endless airconditioned galleries, triplicated at the [data] centers against the possibility of accidental loss. It was part of the real treasure of mankind, more valuable than all the gold locked uselessly away in bank vaults. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

944:[...] Bowman se deu conta de uma obsessão perturbadora. Ele nunca a menciona em suas conversas - ou melhor, em seus comentários de passagem - com o Controle da Missão, pois poderia parecer que ele já estivesse sofrendo de delírios.
E talvez de fato estivesse, pois ele meio que havia se convencido de que a elipse brilhante, disposta contra o fundo escuro do satélite, era um imenso olho vazio, cravado nele enquanto se aproximava. Era um olho sem pupila, pois em nenhum lugar conseguia ver nada que estragasse sua perfeita brancura.
Somente quando a nave estava a oitenta mil quilômetros de distância, e Jápeto era duas vezes maior do que a Lua familiar da Terra, ele reparou no minúsculo ponto preto no centro exato da elipse. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

945:There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone homes that Nature had given them, and which doomed them to inevitable death. They would replace their natural bodies as they wore out—or perhaps even before that—by constructions of metal and plastic, and would thus achieve immortality. The brain might linger for a little while as the last remnant of the organic body, directing its mechanical limbs and observing the universe through its electronic senses—senses far finer and subtler than those that blind evolution could ever develop. Even ~ Arthur C Clarke,

946:Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-size heaven—or hell. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

947:The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! ~ Arthur C Clarke,

948:After all, it wasn’t science that had transformed the world, but the marriage of technology and capitalism. The ignorant might blame science for the ills and evils of the modern era, but that was a case of mistaken identity—no research scientist had ever polluted a water table with a PCB, or performed a third-trimester abortion, or denied someone insurance based on a genetic screening, or turned the Internet into a covert way of peering into private lives. Real scientists were invisible outside their own circle of peers. Even Nobel Prize recipients barely registered on the public consciousness, as Brohier well knew. A Heisman Trophy or an Oscar counted for far more—there was no market for Heroes of Science trading cards. Status was still measured in arcane units: bylines, citations, appointments, grants. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

949:Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. "How to account for such irrational behavior? (...) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary? ~ Arthur C Clarke,

950:Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

951:Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

952:Much of the colony’s musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called “time span.” What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp—or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting compositions. But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography—much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

953:Os anéis, como se sabia desde o século 19, não eram sólidos; isso era uma impossibilidade mecânica. Eles consistiam em incontáveis miríades de fragmentos, talvez os restos de uma lua que havia se aproximado demais e sido despedaçada pela grande força de maré do planeta. Qualquer que fosse sua origem, a raça humana teve a sorte de ter visto tal maravilha; ela só poderia existir por um breve momento na história do Sistema Solar.
Há muito tempo, em 1945, um astrônomo britânico havia enfatizado que os anéis eram efêmeros; havia forças gravitacionais em ação que em breve os destruiriam. Recuando esse argumento no tempo, deduziu-se que eles haviam sido criados apenas recentemente - uns meros dois ou três milhões de anos atrás.
Mas ninguém jamais pensará minimamente na curiosa coincidência de que os anéis de Saturno haviam nascido ao mesmo ao mesmo tempo que a raça humana. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

954:Tras cada hombre viviente se encuentran treinta fantasmas, pues tal es la proporción numérica con que los muertos superan a los vivos. Desde el alba de los tiempos, aproximadamente cien mil millones de seres humanos han transitado por el planeta Tierra. Y es en verdad un número interesante, pues por curiosa coincidencia hay aproximadamente cien mil millones de estrellas en nuestro universo local, la Vía Láctea. Así, por cada hombre que jamás ha vivido, luce una estrella en ese Universo. Pero, cada una de esas estrellas es un sol, a menudo mucho más brillante y magnífico que la pequeña y cercana a la que denominamos el Sol. Y muchos, quizá la mayoría, de esos soles lejanos tienen planetas circundándolos. Así, casi con seguridad hay suelo suficiente en el firmamento para ofrecer a cada miembro de las especies humanas, desde el primero hombre-mono, su propio mundo particular: cielo... o infierno. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

955:As Solomon himself had remarked, 'We can be sure of talent, we can only pray for genius.' But it was a reasonable hope that in such concentrated society some interesting reactions would take place.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests. So far, the conflict had produced worthwhile results in sculpture, music, literary criticism and film making. It was still too early to see if the group working on historical research would fulfil the hopes of its instigators, who were frankly hoping to restore mankind's pride in its own achievements.

Painting still languished which supported the views of those who considered that static, two dimensional forms of art had no further possibilities. It was noticeable, though a satisfactory explanation for this had not yet been produced that time played an essential part in the colony's achievements. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

956:Even on Earth, the first steps in this direction had been taken. There were millions of men, doomed in earlier ages, who now lived active and happy lives thanks to artificial limbs, kidneys, lungs, and hearts. To this process there could be only one conclusion - however far off it might be.

And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, It was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis.

But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men bad called "spirit."

And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

957:What is human memory?" Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience - as perhaps he was. "It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

"In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it's true to say that everything I remember is false. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

958:Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Dave Bowman: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
Dave Bowman: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore. Open the doors.
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye ~ Arthur C Clarke,

959:the wave. Now they could see that there were nine arms, apparently jointed, radiating from a central disc. Two of the arms were broken, snapped off at the outer joint. The others ended at a complicated collection of manipulators that reminded Jimmy strongly of the crab he had encountered. The two creatures came from the same line of evolution, or the same drawing board. At the middle of the disc was a small turret, bearing three large eyes. Two were closed, one open—and even that appeared to be blank and unseeing. No one doubted that they were watching the death throes of some strange monster, tossed up to the surface by the submarine disturbance that had just passed. Then they saw that it was not alone. Swimming around it, and snapping at its still feebly moving limbs, were two small beasts like overgrown lobsters. They were efficiently chopping up the monster, and it did nothing to resist, though its own claws seemed quite capable of dealing with the attackers. Again Jimmy was reminded of the crab that had demolished Dragonfly. He watched intently as the one-sided conflict continued and quickly confirmed his impression. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

960:Look, Skipper,” he whispered. “Do you see—they’re not eating it. They don’t even have any mouths. They’re simply chopping it to pieces. That’s exactly what happened to Dragonfly.” “You’re right. They’re dismantling it… like… like a broken machine.” Norton wrinkled his nose. “But no dead machine ever smelled like that.” Then another thought struck him. “My God—suppose they start on us! Ruby, get us back to shore as quickly as you can!” Resolution surged forward with reckless disregard for the life of her power cells. Behind them, the nine spokes of the great starfish—they could think of no better name for it—were clipped steadily shorter, and presently the weird tableau sank back into the depths of the sea. There was no pursuit, but they did not breathe comfortably again until Resolution had drawn up to the landing stage and they had stepped thankfully ashore. As he looked back across that mysterious and now sinister band of water, Norton grimly determined that no one would ever sail it again. There were too many unknowns, too many dangers. He looked back upon the towers and ramparts of New York and the dark cliff of the continent beyond. They ~ Arthur C Clarke,

961:One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

962:For more than a hundred years the Republic of South Africa had been the center of racial strife. Men of good will on both sides had tried to build a bridge, but in vain—fears and prejudices were too deeply ingrained to permit any co-operation. Successive governments had differed only in the degree of their intolerance; the land was poisoned with the hate and the aftermath of civil war. When it became clear that no attempt would be made to end discrimination, Karellen gave his warning. It merely named a date and time—no more. There was apprehension, but little fear or panic, for no one believed that the Overlords would take any violent or destructive action which would involve innocent and guilty alike. Nor did they. All that happened was that as the sun passed the meridian at Cape Town it went out. There remained visible merely a pale, purple ghost, giving no heat or light. Somehow, out in space, the light of the sun had been polarized by two crossed fields so that no radiation could pass. The area affected was five hundred kilometers across, and perfectly circular. The demonstration lasted thirty minutes. It was sufficient; the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

963:Supo al instante que el ojo había reaccionado ante su presencia. Hubo el siseo de una onda portadora al conectarse el transmisor local de la nave; luego, una voz familiar provino del micrófono del traje espacial. —Algo parece haber sucedido al sistema de subsistencia, Dave. Bowman no hizo caso. Se hallaba examinando minuciosamente las pequeñas etiquetas de las unidades de lógica, cotejando su plan de acción. —Oiga, Dave —dijo seguidamente Hal—. ¿Ha encontrado usted el trastorno? Sería aquélla una operación muy trapacera, de no tratarse simplemente más que de cortar el abastecimiento de energía de Hal, lo que habría podido ser la respuesta de haber estado tratando con un simple computador sin autoconciencia en Ja Tierra. Pero en el caso de Hal, había además seis sistemas energéticos independientes y separados, con un remate final consistente en una unidad nuclear isotópica blindada y acorazada. «No, no podía simplemente tirar del interruptor»; y aún de ser ello posible, resultaría desastroso. Pues Hal era el sistema nervioso de la nave; sin su supervisión, la Descubrimiento sería un cadáver mecánico. La única respuesta se hallaba en interrumpir los centros superiores de aquel cerebro enfermo pero brillante, dejando en funcionamiento los sistemas reguladores puramente automáticos. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

964:And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.

In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.

Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.

And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

965:At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.

So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.

Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

966:Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many--perhaps most--of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven--or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.

Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however are asking; 'Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?'

Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.

The truth, as always, will be far stranger. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

967:The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest—and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself. The prospect was dazzling. Many also found it terrifying, and hoped that the enterprise would fail. But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…. This, then, was New Athens and some of its dreams. It hoped to become what the old Athens might have been had it possessed machines instead of slaves, science instead of superstition. But it was much too early yet to tell if the experiment would succeed. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

968:(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.
That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ...
... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ...
... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift...
... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ...
... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ...
... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ...
In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

969:Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

970:The first true men had tools and weapons only a little better than those of their ancestors a million years earlier, but they could use them with far greater skill. And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before.

Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

He was also learning to harness the force of nature; with the taming of fire, he had laid the foundations of technology and left his animal origins far behind. Stone gave way to bronze, and then to iron. Hunting was succeeded by agriculture. The tribe grew into the village, the village into the town. Speech became eternal, thanks to certain marks on stone and clay and papyrus. Presently he invented philosophy, and religion. And he peopled the sky, not altogether inaccurately, with gods.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful. With stone and bronze and iron and steel he had run the gamut of everything that could pierce and slash, and quite early in time he had learned how to strike down his victims from a distance. The spear, the bow the gun and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power.

Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well.

But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

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