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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cc9ac51 | Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d22de1f | So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers. But their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4e44a13 | T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion. | good-behavior leadership | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 31d4299 | Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, "What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e6a31b0 | And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, "Good-bye." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 959594b | It was idle to speculate, to build pyramids of surmise on a foundation of ignorance. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1752ca1 | Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and 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. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automaticall.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f99743b | The trouble with cliche's, some philosopher remarked, probably with a yawn, is that they are so boringly true. But "love at first sight" is never boring." | love-at-first-sight | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| b30d9b1 | My dear Rikki," Karellen retorted, "it's only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 8ed815e | life was not a joyride at an amusement park. It was a deadly serious affair and only through a combination of solid values, self-control, and a steady commitment to a worthwhile goal was there a chance to achieve happiness. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6b8854f | There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone homes that Nature had given them, and which doomed them to inevitable death. They would replace their natural bodies as they wore out--or perhaps even before .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 96132af | Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow--incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun. Dying? No--that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1bd09bf | It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d22ddc2 | How I envy them," said Colonel Jones. "Sometimes it's quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 512c13d | Belief in God is apparently a psychological arti-fact of mammalian reproduction. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 056cb9e | You know why Wainwright and his kind fear me, don't you?.. They fear that we know the truth about the origins of their faiths. How long, they wonder, have we been observing humanity? Have we watched Mohammad begin the hegira, or Moses giving the Jews their law? Do we know all the false in their stories they believe? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2f84931 | The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke gave us the law 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic | Derren Brown | ||
| 264d2c9 | He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 94945de | Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d36215f | My God -- it's full of stars! -Dave Bowman. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 8ea203b | Miranda looked up at him through a haze of desire, her will consumed by a fierce crackling heat, just like the dry twigs of the old woman's fire. | witchcraft | Anya Seton | |
| 0577ede | The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him--but not to like him. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 30dbe3a | There could be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 83ce7e0 | After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| fc549a8 | It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| b3eda01 | All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun. | future hope | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| c39220c | Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 29574b5 | Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| ccdff27 | For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 9aa3abc | He pressed the button, and waited. Several minutes later, a metal arm moved out from the bunk, and a plastic nipple descended toward his lips. He sucked on it eagerly, and a warm, sweet fluid coursed down his throat, bringing renewed strength with every drop. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1012567 | And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 0c2b762 | I seem to be having difficulty--my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this, 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.'" The" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| bcf34f1 | Jan had always been a good pianist--and now he was the finest in the world. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6b2b1d0 | I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 64d18b5 | You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness--only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| ef74bb9 | They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God. | evil galaxy god good justice race space sun universe | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 745c2d5 | For the sum of everything was a circle, and the circle was labelled Zero | David Goodis | ||
| bfd2452 | I lost my spinal column a good many years ago. There ain't no surgery can put it back. Even if there was, I wouldn't want it. I like it better this way. More comfortable. | David Goodis | ||
| 25f3112 | He craved Mildred's body and he couldn't do without it, and that was the one and only reason he went on living with her. | David Goodis | ||
| 8e3be4c | See, everything that ever could possibly have happened, in the entire history of the universe right from the Big Bang up until now, _did_ happen -- somewhere. And _every_ possible difference means a different universe. Not just if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or won, or whatever he didn't do here; what does Napoleon matter to the _universe_, anyway? Betelgeuse doesn't give a flying damn for all of Europe, past, present, or future. But every s.. | Lawrence Watt-Evans | ||
| 455df4c | I love life, but not everything in it. I love people, but not all of them. I love myself, but not everything about me. | Phillip C. McGraw | ||
| 9f1ff65 | can't change what you don't acknowledge. | Phillip C. McGraw | ||
| 061090b | At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain. | nature | Anita Desai | |
| c01aa35 | Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you're risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it's likely that your business will be built to last. If you're a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company's recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day job.. | Adam M. Grant |