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.
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
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.
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 avala...
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
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.
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.
Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
Humor was the enemy of desire.
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...
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence. [ : Chapter 19]
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.
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.
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 real...
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 w...
It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.
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' ...
