"Arthur C. Clarke"の名言

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

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

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.

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.

Humor was the enemy of desire.

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.

All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

Outro pensamento lhe ocorria sempre que varria com os olhos aquelas minúsculas manchetes eletrônicas. Quanto mais maravilhoso o meio de comunicação, mais trivial, medíocre ou deprimente seu conteúdo parecia ser. Acidentes, crimes, desastres naturais ou provocados pelo homem, ameaças de conflito, editoriais sombrios - essas coisas ainda pareciam ser a preocupação principal dos milhões de palavras borrifadas no éter. E, no entanto, Floyd também se perguntava se isso de fato seria ruim; os jornais de Utopia, ele concluíra há muito tempo, seriam terrivelmente chatos.

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.

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.

A hundred failures would not matter, when one single success could change the destiny of the world.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

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.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.