Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008)
British author, inventor and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.
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.
The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But 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.
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. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.
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.
“I am the King.” Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones — scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago — was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.
There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.
Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superiorscience and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic — hardware and technology — to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.
I now spend a good part of my day dreaming of times past, present and future. As I try to survive on 15 hours sleep a day, I have plenty of time to enjoy vivid dreams. Being completely wheel-chaired doesn't stop my mind from roaming the universe — on the contrary!
The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.
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.
The rash assertion that 'God made man in His own image' is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths, and as the hierarchy of the universe is disclosed to us, we may have to recognize this chilling truth: if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.