What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.
It's only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!
Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.
No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice.
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.
Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.
The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.
I think in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made ...This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that.
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.
Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles... It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!
Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.
Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
People go through four stages before any revolutionary development: 1. It's nonsense, don't waste my time. 2. It's interesting, but not important. 3. I always said it was a good idea. 4. I thought of it first.
Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy -- of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.
Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it.
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
The only place success comes before work is a dictionary
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.
You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.
Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?
One by one she would cut through the orbits of Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion... worlds bearing the names of gods and goddesses who had vanished only yesterday, as time was counted here.
The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.
There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three.
It is vital to remember that information -- in the sense of raw data -- is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
'2001' was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words, though they are many.
The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.
I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.
The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.
Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.
Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a space station in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945).
once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization.
The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures.
Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.
When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.
We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn't. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet's random geological savagery.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency.
If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'
It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings. Alan Bishop.
The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.
Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.
The rash assertion that God made man in His own image is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias--boredom.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias -- boredom.
When, taking all factors into account, anything can be proved to be impossible, that usually means that it will be done in some different manner and employing a new and unforeseen technique.
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.