About Arthur C. Clarke: Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was a British - Sri Lankan science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
...science fiction is something that happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that happen - though often you only wish that it could.
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 i...
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 ...
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...
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.
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.
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.
It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.
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.
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell
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.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
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.
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 ev...
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.
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
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.
. . . 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 h...
. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
