Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

I'm sure we would not have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books

Man sank into a superstitious barbarism during which he distorted history to remove his sense of impotence and failure

Pero nadie pensaba que llegaría muy lejos, porque ni siquiera creo que fuera capaz de integrar e elevado a x. - ¿Es posible tal ignorancia? - preguntó alguien con asombro. - Puede que esté exagerando. Digamos x por e elevado a x.

One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn's, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.)

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

had often been said that the only thing that could unite Mankind was a threat from space.

Is there intelligent life on Earth? Yours

Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought.

Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

There is something very strange about a universe where a few dead butterflies can balance a billion-ton tower.

The suggestion that the cores of the gas giants might consist of diamond was first made by Marvin Ross of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a classic paper "The ice layer in Uranus and Neptune—diamonds in the sky?" (Nature, Vol. 292, No. 5822, pp. 435–36, July 30, 1981.) Surprisingly, Ross did not extend his calculations to Jupiter.

At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether.

Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist.

The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship.

She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it's not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health.

As a matter of interest," he said

Yet there was also something slightly spooky about them. Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Cosmo Christers state as incontrovertible fact.

Hal's internal fault predictor could have made a mistake." "It's more

Curnow had once remarked that Dr. Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation.

Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.

Oh, I can think of many reasons. Perhaps it's a signal, so that any strange ship entering our universe will know where to look for life. Perhaps it marks the centre of galactic administration. Or perhaps—and somehow I feel that this is the real explanation—it's simply the greatest of all works of art. But it's foolish to speculate now. In a few hours we shall know the truth.

A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled—and this did nothing at all to help—a phrase he had once come across: "Someone is walking over your grave.