Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

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

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.

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

a man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.

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.

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.

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.

I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way?

Martin's one of the nicest fellows you could meet, as long as you don't do it too often.

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.

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.

Call it the Star Gate.

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.

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence.

And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners.

That first Prime Monitor," he said, "was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system.

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?

In Brohier's eyes, violence was not merely the last refuge of the incompetent. It was the gloating revenge of the sore loser.

This would involve disconnection—the computer equivalent of death. Despite

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.

Hal in full control of the ship. 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.

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.

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.