Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA (Theodore Gericault, 1791–1824)

There is nothing in the least exciting or glamorous about deep-water operations—if they're done properly. Excitement means lack of foresight, and that means incompetence. The incompetent do not last long in my business, nor do those who crave excitement. I went about my job with all the pent-up emotion of a plumber dealing with a leaking faucet.

I HEAR YOU, FRANK. THIS IS DAVE.

If a man from medieval times could have seen this red-lit city, and the beings moving through it, he would certainly have believed himself in Hell. Even Jan, for all his curiosity and scientific detachment, found himself on the verge of unreasoning terror. The absence of a single familiar reference point can be utterly unnerving even to the coolest and clearest of minds.

Alexander Wainwright was a tall, handsome man in the late forties. He was, Stormgren knew, completely honest, and therefore doubly dangerous.

Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

But dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one.

Hal remained a low-grade moron.

Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic

Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist.

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And

From our point of view, human beings are astonishingly xenophobic. There are not many examples in our data base of spacefarers who are as sociologically backward as your species.

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.

The recipe for a long, happy life: consult with old philosophers and young doctors, consort with old friends and young women.

When no one lacks anything, there is no point in stealing.

Norton suddenly recalled the myth of Oceanus, the sea that, the ancients believed, surrounded the Earth.

And history could never take from him the privilege of being the first of all mankind to gaze upon the works of an alien civilization.

Ya sé, desde luego, que la Atlántida de Platón nunca existió en realidad. Por esta misma razón, nunca podrá morir. Siempre será un ideal, un sueño de perfección , una meta que inspirará a los hombres en la posteridad.

Einsteinian time dilation.

Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope towards a future.

The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the second was an equally infallible method—as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood—of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration.

classical Hohmann orbit—

Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism—perhaps the most austere of all religions—still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly.

But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates—on a slightly larger scale.