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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8178ec5 | He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1572b19 | For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6b4e31e | Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2bbb1f2 | After all, it wasn't science that had transformed the world, but the marriage of technology and capitalism. The ignorant might blame science for the ills and evils of the modern era, but that was a case of mistaken identity--no research scientist had ever polluted a water table with a PCB, or performed a third-trimester abortion, or denied someone insurance based on a genetic screening, or turned the Internet into a covert way of peering in.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d77f0b7 | Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 233f54c | We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| dfd027d | The time has come," said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, "to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c7238a6 | One hemisphere was a giant bull's-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 27f4173 | throbbed into silence... "And that's the way it was--goodbye, wonderful and terrible Twentieth" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 0bfd521 | They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 739d685 | He was now probably the world's leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time, | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 334bc1f | Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c4ac8a4 | Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists. | science | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 8a9d3d8 | One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4e46864 | Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 92b807f | like everything that was worth doing, that would take time and practice. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 7480dd3 | Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 39405e6 | there's something fundamentally wrong with the wiring of our brains, which makes us incapable of consistent logical thinking. To make matters worse, though all creatures need a certain amount of aggressiveness to survive, we seem to have far more than is absolutely necessary. And no other animal tortures its fellows as we do. Is this an evolutionary accident--a piece of genetic bad luck? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c1c2de0 | He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it.... | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| a0ad093 | History never repeats itself--but historical situations recur." As" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| df4473f | He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 8cbf1a2 | forty-one was a "very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes." -- | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 20dd246 | Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence. | humor science-fiction scifi space | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| faa9589 | While there was life, there was hope; | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4e52248 | Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e2260f2 | Can you sum up your ideas in less than--oh, a thousand bits? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 25e5ad0 | In some ways," admitted the Overlord gravely. "In others perhaps a better analogy can be found in the history of your colonial powers. The Roman and British Empires, for that reason, have always been of considerable interest to us. The case of India is particularly instructive. The main difference between us and the British in India was that they had no real motives for going there--no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| baa8744 | They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999--but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| cad36a9 | What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity. | intensity time | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| fb00338 | It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2aa326f | Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion. | physics | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 7a7fa75 | Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d4a9e8d | During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 987fe90 | But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the flat Florida landscape--the multiple rails of a giant launching track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 814e7f8 | yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour;" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 81f9ec7 | No need to go to the dolphins," interjected Max Brailovsky. "One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he'd won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste!" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d120831 | Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget. | intelligence life | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| e9cedb3 | Much of the colony's musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called "time span." What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp--or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| db45881 | Jean was definitely the girl who mattered, despite her queer ideas and queerer friends. He had no intention of totally abandoning Naomi or Joy or Elsa or--what was her name?--Denise; but the time had come for something more permanent. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 8b48a9e | Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| a64efad | But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography--much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 094b26e | We have had our failures." Yes, Karellen, that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world?" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| a5f7756 | The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest--and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on "total identification." The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old "moving pictures" more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| b1e7830 | Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become--for a while, at least--any other person, and could take par.. | Arthur C. Clarke |