Background Image

...

What Is Becoming More Interesting Than The Myths Themselves Has Been The Study Of How The Myths Were Constructed From Sparse Or Unpromising Facts Indeed, Sometimes From No Facts In A Kind Of Mute Conspiracy Of Longing, Very Rarely Under Anybody's Conscious Control.

-Arthur C. Clarke

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

What Is Becoming More

Arthur C. Clarke

...

What Is Becoming More Interesting Than The Myths Themselves Has Been The Study Of How The Myths Were Constructed From Sparse Or Unpromising Facts Indeed, Sometimes From No Facts In A Kind Of Mute Conspiracy Of Longing, Very Rarely Under Anybody's Conscious Control.

Views: 77060

Topic

More From Arthur C. Clarke

The Best Proof Of Intelligent Life In Space Is That It Hasn't Come Here.

The Future Is Not To Be Forecast, But Created.

Getting Information From The Internet Is Like Getting A Glass Of Water From The Niagara Falls.

Sometimes When I'm In A Bookstore Or Library, I Am Overwhelmed By All The Things That I Do Not Know. Then I Am Seized By A Powerful Desire To Read All The Books, One By One.

Why, Robert Singh Often Wondered, Did We Give Our Hearts To Friends Whose Life Spans Are So Much Shorter Than Our Own?

I Want To Be Remembered Most As A Writer - One Who Entertained Readers, And, Hopefully, Stretched Their Imagination As Well.

Any Smoothly Functioning Technology Will Have The Appearance Of Magic.

Moses Kaldor Had Always Loved Mountains; They Made Him Feel Nearer To The God Whose Nonexistence He Still Sometimes Resented.

The Rash Assertion That "god Made Man In His Own Image" Is Ticking Like A Time Bomb At The Foundation Of Many Faiths.

I Don't Pretend We Have All The Answers. But The Questions Are Certainly Worth Thinking About.

Questions And Answers

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.

When You Finally Understand The Universe, It Will Not Only Be Stranger Than You Imagine, It Will Be Stranger Than You Can Imagine.

Even By The Twenty-second Century, No Way Had Yet Been Discovered Of Keeping Elderly And Conservative Scientists From Occupying Crucial Administrative Positions. Indeed, It Was Doubted If The Problem Ever Would Be Solved.

As Three Laws Were Good Enough For Newton, I Have Modestly Decided To Stop There.

Science Is The Only Religion Of Mankind.

I Don't Believe In God But I'm Very Interested In Her.

They Will Have Time Enough, In Those Endless Aeons, To Attempt All Things, And To Gather All Knowledge... No Gods Imagined By Our Minds Have Ever Possessed The Powers They Will Command... But For All That, They May Envy Us, Basking In The Bright Afterglow Of Creation; For We Knew The Universe When It Was Young.

Once You Can Reproduce A Phenomenon, You Are Well On The Way To Understanding It.

In This Universe The Night Was Falling; The Shadows Were Lengthening Towards An East That Would Not Know Another Dawn. But Elsewhere The Stars Were Still Young And The Light Of Morning Lingered; And Along The Path He Once Had Followed, Man Would One Day Go Again.

God Said, 'cancel Program Genesis.' The Universe Ceased To Exist.

What Was More, They Had Taken The First Step Toward Genuine Friendship. They Had Exchanged Vulnerabilities.

Our Own Grandchildren May Demonstrate That-sometimes- Gigantic Is Beautiful.

Guns Are The Crutches Of The Impotent.

One Of The Biggest Roles Of Science Fiction Is To Prepare People To Accept The Future Without Pain And To Encourage A Flexibility Of The Mind. Politicians Should Read Science Fiction, Not Westerns And Detective Stories.

You Don't Believe In Organized Religion, Yet A Major Theme In So Many Of Your Works Seems To Be A Quest For God.

The West Needs To Relearn What The Rest Of The World Has Never Forgotten - That There Is Nothing Sinful In Leisure As Long As It Does Not Degenerate Into Mere Sloth.

If Such A Thing Had Happened Once, It Must Surely Have Happened Many Times In This Galaxy Of A Hundred Billion Suns.

He Found It Both Sad And Fascinating That Only Through An Artificial Universe Of Video Images Could She Establish Contact With The Real World.

As His Body Became More And More Defenseless, So His Means Of Offense Became Steadily More Frightful.

I Will Not Be Afraid Because I Understand ... And Understanding Is Happiness.

Now, Before You Make A Movie, You Have To Have A Script, And Before You Have A Script, You Have To Have A Story; Though Some Avant-garde Directors Have Tried To Dispense With The Latter Item, You'll Find Their Work Only At Art Theaters.

Civilization Will Reach Maturity Only When It Learns To Value Diversity Of Character And Of Ideas.

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.

You Can't Have It Both Ways. You Can't Have Both Free Will And A Benevolent Higher Power Who Protects You From Yourself.

Reading Computer Manuals Without The Hardware Is As Frustrating As Reading Sex Manuals Without The Software.

Much Blood Has Also Been Spilled On The Carpet In Attempts To Distinguish Between Science Fiction And Fantasy. I Have Suggested An Operational Definition: Science Fiction Is Something That Could Happen - But Usually You Wouldn't Want It To. Fantasy Is Something That Couldn't Happen - Though Often You Only Wish That It Could.

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!"

In The Long Run, There Are No Secrets. In Science. The Universe Will Not Cooperate In A Cover-up.

But He Knew Well Enough That Any Man In The Right Circumstances Could Be Dehumanised By Panic.

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.

The Object Of Teaching A Child Is To Enable The Child To Get Along Without The Teacher. We Need To Educate Our Children For Their Future, Not Our Past.

Behind Every Man Now Alive Stand Thirty Ghosts, For That Is The Ratio By Which The Dead Outnumber The Living.

We Have To Abandon The Idea That Schooling Is Something Restricted To Youth. How Can It Be, In A World Where Half The Things A Man Knows At 20 Are No Longer True At 40 - And Half The Things He Knows At 40 Hadn't Been Discovered When He Was 20?

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.

If Man Can Live In Manhattan, He Can Live Anywhere.

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.

But Please Remember: This Is Only A Work Of Fiction. The Truth, As Always, Will Be Far Stranger.

All Explorers Are Seeking Something They Have Lost. It Is Seldom That They Find It, And More Seldom Still That The Attainment Brings Them Greater Happiness Than The Quest.

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.

Anything That Is Theoretically Possible Will Be Achieved In Practice, No Matter What The Technical Difficulties Are, If It Is Desired Greatly Enough.

It Was The Mark Of A Barbarian To Destroy Something One Could Not Understand.

I Sometimes Wonder How We Spent Leisure Time Before Satellite Television And Internet Came Along…and Then I Realise That I Have Spent More Than Half Of My Life In The ‘dark Ages’!

At The Present Rate Of Progress, It Is Almost Impossible To Imagine Any Technical Feat That Cannot Be Achieved - If It Can Be Achieved At All - Within The Next Few Hundred Years.

Seti Is Probably The Most Important Quest Of Our Time , And It Amazes Me That Governments And Corporations Are Not Supporting It Sufficiently.

In Fact, One Of The Arguments For Searching For Intelligent Life In Space, Elsewhere, Is That We Have No Evidence That Intelligence Has Any Survival Value. The Most Successful Creatures On This Planet Are The Cockroaches. They've Been Around, What Is It, 100 Million Years Or So And I Suspect They'll Still Be There 100 Million Years In The Future. Maybe Intelligence Is An Evolutionary Aberration Which Dooms Its Possessors In The Way Armor May Have Doomed Some Of The Dinosaurs.

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.

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

Science Demands Patience.

Good Morning, Doctors. I Have Taken The Liberty Of Removing Windows 95 From My Hard Drive.

The Fact That We Have Not Yet Found The Slightest Evidence For Life - Much Less Intelligence - Beyond This Earth Does Not Surprise Or Disappoint Me In The Least. Our Technology Must Still Be Laughably Primitive, We May Be Like Jungle Savages Listening For The Throbbing Of Tom-toms While The Ether Around Them Carries More Words Per Second Than They Could Utter In A Lifetime.

Only Small Minds Are Impressed By Large Numbers.

Space Can Be Mapped And Crossed And Occupied Without Definable Limit; But It Can Never Be Conquered. When Our Race Has Reached Its Ultimate Achievements, And The Stars Themselves Are Scattered No More Widely Than The Seed Of Adam, Even Then We Shall Still Be Like Ants Crawling On The Face Of The Earth. The Ants Have Covered The World, But Have They Conquered It - For What Do Their Countless Colonies Know Of It, Or Of Each Other?

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 Theory Which Can No Longer Be Taken Very Seriously Is That Ufos Are Interstellar Spaceships.

The Goal Of The Future Is Full Unemployment, So We Can Play. That's Why We Have To Destroy The Present Politico-economic System.

Isaac Asimov Is, In Reality, Based On Something I Had Invented A Few Years Previously.

The Greatest Tragedy In Mankind's Entire History May Be The Hijacking Of Morality By Religion.

I Don't Think There Are Any Secrets To Writing In The - Everybody Has Their Own Techniques. You Must Be Widely Read, That's One Thing, Because You Have To Resolve A Tremendous Amount Of Background Information. Also, You Should Know What The Competition Is Writing, Just So You're Not Wasting Your Time Doing The Same Thing. Unless You Do It Better, Of Course.

If I Didn't Exist, I Would Have Invented Myself.

Religion Is A Byproduct Of Fear.

Now Times Had Changed, And The Inherited Wisdom Of The Past Had Become Folly.

Humor Was The Enemy Of Desire.

This Is The First Age That's Ever Paid Much Attention To The Future, Which Is A Little Ironic Since We May Not Have One.

If An Elderly But Distinguished Scientist Says That Something Is Possible, He Is Almost Certainly Right; But If He Says That It Is Impossible, He Is Very Probably Wrong.

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.'

Sometimes I Think We're Alone In The Universe, And Sometimes I Think We're Not. In Either Case The Idea Is Quite Staggering.

The Limits Of The Possible Can Only Be Defined By Going Beyond Them Into The Impossible.

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 The Best Of All To Be Sane And Happy. Whether Our Descendants Can Achieve That Goal Will Be The Greatest Challenge Of The Future. Indeed, It May Well Decide Whether We Have Any Future.

It Will Be Possible In A Few More Years To Build Radio Controlled Rockets Which Can Be Steered Into Such Orbits Beyond The Limits Of The Atmosphere And Left To Broadcast Scientific Information Back To The Earth. A Little Later, Manned Rockets Will Be Able To Make Similar Flights With Sufficient Excess Power To Break The Orbit And Return To Earth. (1945) [predicting Communications Satellites.]

Any Path To Knowledge Is A Path To God-or Reality, Whichever Word One Prefers To Use

Every Age Has Its Dreams, Its Symbols Of Romance. Past Generations Were Moved By The Graceful Power Of The Great Windjammers, By The Distant Whistle Of Locomotives Pounding Through The Night, By The Caravans Leaving On The Golden Road To Samarkand, By Quinqueremes Of Nineveh From Distant Ophir . . . Our Grandchildren Will Likewise Have Their Inspiration-among The Equatorial Stars. They Will Be Able To Look Up At The Night Sky And Watch The Stately Procession Of The Ports Of Earth-the Strange New Harbors Where The Ships Of Space Make Their Planetfalls And Their Departures.

Good Morning, Dr. Chandra. This Is Hal. I Am Ready For My First Lesson.

The Success Of A Science Fiction Writer Is If He Can Write A Good Read.

Science Fiction

A Precondition For Being A Science Fiction Writer Other Than An Interest In The Future Is That, An Interest - At Least An Understanding Of Science, Not Necessarily A Science Degree But You Must Have A Feeling For The Science And Its Possibilities And Its Impossibilities, Otherwise You're Writing Fantasy. Now, Fantasy Is Also Fine, But There Is A Distinction, Although No One's Ever Been Able To Say Just Where The Dividing Lines Come.

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?

The Truth, As Always, Will Be Far Stranger.

Religion Is A By-product Of Fear. For Much Of Human History It May Have Been A Necessary Evil, But Why Was It More Evil Than Necessary? Isn’t Killing People In The Name Of God A Pretty Good Definition Of Insanity?

We Cannot Predict The New Forces, Powers, And Discoveries That Will Be Disclosed To Us When We Reach The Other Planets And Set Up New Laboratories In Space. They Are As Much Beyond Our Vision Today As Fire Or Electricity Would Be Beyond The Imagination Of A Fish.

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.

The Difference Between Machines And Human Beings Is That Human Beings Can Be Reproduced By Unskilled Labour.

Two Possibilities Exist: Either We Are Alone In The Universe Or We Are Not. Both Are Equally Terrifying.

There Is Hopeful Symbolism In The Fact That Flags Do Not Wave In A Vacuum.

Deep Beneath The Surface Of The Sun, Enormous Forces Were Gathering. At Any Moment, The Energies Of A Million Hydrogen Bombs Might Burst Forth In The Awesome Explosion.... Climbing At Millions Of Miles Per Hour, An Invisible Fireball Many Times The Size Of Earth Would Leap From The Sun And Head Out Across Space.

One Can Imagine A Time When Men Who Still Inhabit Organic Bodies Are Regarded With Pity By Those Who Have Passed On To An Infinitely Richer Mode Of Existence, Capable Of Throwing Their Consciousness Or Sphere Of Attention Instantaneously To Any Point On Land, Sea, Or Sky Where There Is A Suitable Sensing Organ. In Adolescence We Leave Childhood Behind; One Day There May Be A Second And More Portentous Adolescence, When We Bid Farewell To The Flesh.

The Greatest Tragedy In Mankind's Entire History May Be The Hijacking Of Morality By Religion. However Valuable-even Necessary-that May Have Been In Enforcing Good Behavior On Primitive Peoples, Their Association Is Now Counterproductive. Yet At The Very Moment When They Should Be Decoupled, Sanctimonious Nitwits Are Calling For A Return To Morals Based On Superstition.

Never Attribute To Malevolence What Is Merely Due To Incompetence

The Space Elevator Will Be Built About 50 Years After Everyone Stops Laughing.

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.

I'm Surprised At Some Technological Development, And The Realization That Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic. I Think The Cd-rom Is The Best Example Of That. The Idea Of Having A Whole Symphony, Or Opera, Or Novel In A Little Piece Of Plastic Is Pretty Amazing.

No Utopia Can Ever Give Satisfaction To Everyone, All The Time. As Their Material Conditions Improve, Men Raise Their Sights And Become Discontented With Power And Possessions That Once Would Have Seemed Beyond Their Wildest Dreams. And Even When The External World Has Granted All It Can, There Still Remain The Searchings Of The Mind And The Longings Of The Heart.

A Well-stocked Mind Is Safe From Boredom.

I'm Sometimes Asked How I Would Like To Be Remembered. I've Had A Diverse Career As A Writer, Underwater Explorer, Space Promoter And Science Populariser. Of All These, I Want To Be Remembered Most As A Writer - One Who Entertained Readers, And, Hopefully, Stretched Their Imagination As Well.

Only Feeble Minds Are Paralyzed By Facts.

Finding Intelligent Life Would Encourage People And Also Of Course The Opportunity Of Learning A Tremendous Amount, But This Is A Danger. We Might Be So Overwhelmed With Knowledge And Information, That We Might Be Depressed Or Even Become Suicidal - Because What's The Point If They're Thousands Of Years Ahead Of Us? Why Should We Bother? - Or Become The Ultimate Couch Potatoes.

... Chemistry Is A Trade For People Without Enough Imagination To Be Physicists.

Some Dangers Are So Spectacular And So Much Beyond Normal Experience That The Mind Refuses To Accept Them As Real, And Watches The Approach Of Doom Without Any Sense Of Apprehension. The Man Who Looks At The Onrushing Tidal Wave, The Descending Avalanche, Or The Spinning Funnel Of The Tornado, Yet Makes No Attempt To Flee, Is Not Necessarily Paralyzed With Fright Or Resigned To An Unavoidable Fate. He May Simply Be Unable To Believe That The Message Of His Eyes Concerns Him Personally. It Is All Happening To Somebody Else.

Human Judges Can Show Mercy. But Against The Laws Of Nature, There Is No Appeal.

I Sometimes Think That The Universe Is A Machine Designed For The Perpetual Astonishment Of Astronomers.

Now I'm A Scientific Expert; That Means I Know Nothing About Absolutely Everything.

Space Is What Stops Everything From Happening In The Same Place.

It Was One Thing To Have Guessed It, Another To Have Had That Guess Confirmed Beyond Possibility Of Refutation.

What We Need Is A Machine That Will Let Us See The Other Guy's Point Of View.

A Man Who Grows That Much Hair,' Critics Were Fond Of Saying, 'must Have A Lot To Hide.

The Dinosaurs Disappeared Because They Could Not Adapt To Their Changing Environment. We Shall Disappear If We Cannot Adapt To An Environment That Now Contains Spaceships, Computers - And Thermonuclear Weapons.

Changing Environment

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.

I Don't Believe In Astrology; I'm A Sagittarius And We're Skeptical.

Invade Me Now, My Ruthless Friend, And Make Me Cower In The Dark. Remind Me That I'm All Alone And Draw Upon My Face Your Mark. How Is It That You Capture Me, When All My Thoughts Deny Your Force? Is It The Reptile In My Brain That Lets Your Terror Run Its Course? Baseless Fear Undoes Us All Despite Our Quest For Lofty Goals. We Would-be Galahads Don't Die, Fear Just Freezes All Our Souls. It Keeps Us Mute When Feeling Love, Reminding Us What We Might Lose. And If By Chance We Meet Success, Fear Tells Us Which Safe Route To Choose.

Trying To Predict The Future Is A Discouraging And Hazardous Occupation. If By Some Miracle A Prophet Could Describe The Future Exactly As It Was Going To Take Place, His Predictions Would Sound So Absurd That People Everyone Would Laugh Him To Scorn. The Only Thing We Can Be Sure Of About The Future Is That It Will Be Absolutely Fantastic. So, If What I Say Now Seems To You To Be Very Reasonable, Then I Will Have Failed Completely. Only If What I Tell You Appears Absolutely Unbelievable Have We Any Chance Of Visualizing The Future As It Really Will Happen.

That's One Of Those Meaningless And Unanswerable Questions The Mind Keeps Returning To Endlessly, Like The Tongue Exploring A Broken Tooth.

Science Fiction Does Not Attempt To Predict. It Extrapolates. It Just Says, "what If?" Not What Will Be? Because You Can Never Predict What Will Happen, Particularly In Politics And Economics. You Can To Some Extent Predict In The Technological Sphere - Flying, Space Travel, But Even There We Missed Badly On Some Things, Like Computers. No One Imagined The Incredible Impact Of Computers, Even Though Robot Brains Of Various Kinds But The Idea That One Day Every House Would Have A Computer In Every Room And That One Day We'd Have Computers Built Into Our Clothing, Nobody Ever Thought Of That.

Don't Mess Up The Environment Until You're Quite Sure What You're Doing.

Training Was One Thing, Reality Another.

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.

He Was Moving Through A New Order Of Creation, Of Which Few Men Had Ever Dreamed. Beyond The Realms Of Sea And Land And Air And Space Lay The Realms Of Fire, Which He Alone Had Been Privileged To Glimpse. It Was Too Much To Expect That He Would Also Understand.

Judge Me By My Deeds, Though They Are Few, Rather Than My Words, Though They Are Many.

I Would Defend The Liberty Of Consenting Adult Creationists To Practice Whatever Intellectual Perversions They Like In The Privacy Of Their Own Homes; But It Is Also Necessary To Protect The Young And Innocent.

In This Single Galaxy Of Ours There Are Eighty-seven Thousand Million Suns. [...] In Challenging It, You Would Be Like Ants Attempting To Label And Classify All The Grains Of Sand In All The Deserts Of The World. [...] It Is A Bitter Thought, But You Must Face It. The Planets You May One Day Possess. But The Stars Are Not For Man.

No One Of Intelligence Resents The Inevitable.

The Best Measure Of A Man's Honesty Isn't His Income Tax Return. It's The Zero Adjust On His Bathroom Scale.

When A Distinguished But Elderly Scientist States That Something Is Possible, He Is Almost Certainly Right. When He States That Something Is Impossible, He Is Very Probably Wrong. Perhaps The Adjective 'elderly' Requires Definition. In Physics, Mathematics, And Astronautics It Means Over Thirty; In The Other Disciplines, Senile Decay Is Sometimes Postponed To The Forties. There Are, Of Course, Glorious Exceptions; But As Every Researcher Just Out Of College Knows, Scientists Of Over Fifty Are Good For Nothing But Board Meetings, And Should At All Costs Be Kept Out Of The Laboratory!

It Has Yet To Be Proven That Intelligence Has Any Survival Value.

The Choice, As Wells Once Said, Is The Universe-or Nothing. . . . The Challenge Of The Great Spaces Between The Worlds Is A Stupendous One; But If We Fail To Meet It, The Story Of Our Race Will Be Drawing To Its Close. Humanity Will Have Turned Its Back Upon The Still Untrodden Heights And Will Be Descending Again The Long Slope That Stretches, Across A Thousand Million Years Of Time, Down To The Shores Of The Primeval Sea.

Almost Any Seat Was Comfortable At One-sixth Of A Gravity.

Any Technology Distinguishable From Magic Is Insufficiently Advanced.

Advanced Technology

A Faith That Cannot Survive Collision With The Truth Is Not Worth Many Regrets.

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 Over Estimate Technology In The Short Term And Under Estimate Technology In The Long Term.

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.

It Is Not Easy To See How The More Extreme Forms Of Nationalism Can Long Survive When Men Have Seen The Earth In Its True Perspective As A Single Small Globe Against The Stars.

Some Things Have Eternal Value, And Compassion Is One Of Them. I Hope We Never Lose That. Compassion For Humans As Well As Animals.

The Time Was Fast Approaching When Earth, Like All Mothers, Must Say Farewell To Her Children.

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.

We Seldom Stop To Think That We Are Still Creatures Of The Sea, Able To Leave It Only Because, From Birth To Death, We Wear The Water-filled Space Suits Of Our Skins.

Mars Is The Next Frontier, What The Wild West Was, What America Was 500 Years Ago. It's Time To Strike Out Anew....mars Is Where The Action Is For The Next Thousand Years....the Characteristic Of Human Nature, And Perhaps Our Simian Branch Of The Family, Is Curiosity And Exploration. When We Stop Doing That, We Won't Be Humans Anymore. I've Seen Far More In My Lifetime Than I Ever Dreamed. Many Of Our Problems On Earth Can Only Be Solved By Space Technology....the Next Step Is In Space. It's Inevitable.

There Were Some Things That Only Time Could Cure. Evil Men Could Be Destroyed, But Nothing Could Be Done With Good Men Who Were Deluded.

The Earth Would Only Have To Move A Few Million Kilometers Sunward-or Starward-for The Delicate Balance Of Climate To Be Destroyed. The Antarctic Icecap Would Melt And Flood All Low-lying Land; Or The Oceans Would Freeze And The Whole World Would Be Locked In Eternal Winter. Just A Nudge In Either Direction Would Be Enough.

If We Have Learned One Thing From The History Of Invention And Discovery, It Is That, In The Long Run-and Often In The Short One-the Most Daring Prophecies Seem Laughably Conservative.

If Children Have Interests, Then Education Happens.

I Doubt If There Is A Single Field Of Study So Theoretical, So Remote From What Is Laughingly Called Everyday Life, That It May Not One Day Produce Something That Will Shake The World.

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]

When I Start On A Book, I Have Been Thinking About It And Making Occasional Notes For Some Time... So I Have Lots Of Theme, Locale, Subjects And Technical Ideas... I Don't Worry About Long Periods Of Not Doing Anything. I Know My Subconscious Is Busy.

Floyd Could Imagine A Dozen Things That Could Go Wrong; It Was Little Consolation That It Was Always The Thirteenth That Actually Happened.

I Don't Think There Is Such A Thing As As A Real Prophet. You Can Never Predict The Future. We Know Why Now, Of Course; Chaos Theory, Which I Got Very Interested In, Shows You Can Never Predict The Future.

Death Focuses The Mind On The Things That Really Matter: Why Are We Here, And What Should We Do?

My Objection To Organized Religion Is The Premature Conclusion To Ultimate Truth That It Represents.

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.

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic.

Possible And Impossible

When One Has To Ask, "am I Really In Love?" The Answer Is Always "no".

Science Fiction Seldom Attempts To Predict The Future. More Often Than Not, It Tries To Prevent The Future.

Science Fiction

. . . The Newspapers Of Utopia, He Had Long Ago Decided, Would Be Terribly Dull.

The Best Proof That There's Intelligent Life In The Universe Is That It Hasn't Come Here.

Intelligent Life

It Must Be Wonderful To Be Seventeen, And To Know Everything.

Thought Provoking

All Human Plans [are] Subject To Ruthless Revision By Nature, Or Fate, Or Whatever One Preferred To Call The Powers Behind The Universe.

Perhaps No Other Year Before Or Since 1984 Has Been Awaited With Such Eager Anticipation.

Sometimes A Decision Has To Be Made By A Single Individual, Who Has The Authority To Enforce It. That's Why You Need A Captain. You Can't Run A Ship By A Committee-at Least Not All The Time.

I Have Encountered A Few "creationists" And Because They Were Usually Nice, Intelligent People, I Have Been Unable To Decide Whether They Were Really Mad Or Only Pretending To Be Mad. If I Was A Religious Person, I Would Consider Creationism Nothing Less Than Blasphemy. Do Its Adherents Imagine That God Is A Cosmic Hoaxer Who Has Created The Whole Vast Fossil Record For The Sole Purpose Of Misleading Humankind?

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)

Before You Become Too Entranced With Gorgeous Gadgets And Mesmerizing Video Displays, Let Me Remind You That Information Is Not Knowledge, Knowledge Is Not Wisdom, And Wisdom Is Not Foresight. Each Grows Out Of The Other, And We Need Them All.

The Moon Is The First Milestone On The Road To The Stars.

No Trilogy Should Have More Than Four Books.

The Only Real Problem In Life Is What To Do Next.

'the Devil In The Dark' Impressed Me Because It Presented The Idea, Unusual In Science Fiction Then And Now, That Something Weird, And Even Dangerous, Need Not Be Malevolent. That Is A Lesson That Many Of Today's Politicians Have Yet To Learn.

There Is No Reason To Assume That The Universe Has The Slightest Interest In Intelligence—or Even In Life. Both May Be Random Accidental By-products Of Its Operations Like The Beautiful Patterns On A Butterfly's Wings. The Insect Would Fly Just As Well Without Them.

Space Can Be Mapped And Crossed And Occupied Without Definable Limit; But It Can Never Be Conquered.

No Communication Technology Has Ever Disappeared, But Instead Becomes Increasingly Less Important As The Technological Horizon Widens.

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.

Even If We Never Reach The Stars By Our Own Efforts, In The Millions Of Years That Lie Ahead It Is Almost Certain That The Stars Will Come To Us. Isolationism Is Neither A Practical Policy On The National Or Cosmic Scale. And When The First Contact With The Outer Universe Is Made, One Would Like To Think That Mankind Played An Active And Not Merely A Passive Role-that We Were The Discoverers, Not The Discovered.

What Is Becoming More Interesting Than The Myths Themselves Has Been The Study Of How The Myths Were Constructed From Sparse Or Unpromising Facts Indeed, Sometimes From No Facts In A Kind Of Mute Conspiracy Of Longing, Very Rarely Under Anybody's Conscious Control.

Our Lifetime May Be The Last That Will Be Lived Out In A Technological Society.

Nowhere In Space Will We Rest Our Eyes Upon The Familiar Shapes Of Trees And Plants, Or Any Of The Animals That Share Our World. Whatsoever Life We Meet Will Be As Strange And Alien As The Nightmare Creatures Of The Ocean Abyss, Or Of The Insect Empire Whose Horrors Are Normally Hidden From Us By Their Microscopic Scale.

If The House Is To Be Demolished Tomorrow Anyhow, People Seem To Feel, We May As Well Burn The Furniture Today. None Of Our Problems Are Insoluble... But It Seems Clear That To Prevail We Humans Will Have To Act With A Smartness And Selflessness That Has So Far Eluded Us During Our Long And Tangled History.

Though The Man-apes Often Fought And Wrestled One Another, Their Disputes Very Seldom Resulted In Serious Injuries. Having No Claws Or Fighting Canine Teeth, And Being Well Protected By Hair, They Could Not Inflict Much Harm On One Another. In Any Event, They Had Little Surplus Energy For Such Unproductive Behavior; Snarling And Threatening Was A Much More Efficient Way Of Asserting Their Points Of View.

Absolutely No Religious Rites Of Any Kind, Relating To Any Religious Faith, Should Be Associated With My Funeral.

The Universe Must Be Full Of Voices, Calling From Star To Star In A Myriad Tongues. One Day We Shall Join That Cosmic Conversation.

The Phenomenon Of Ufo Doesn't Say Anything About The Presence Of Intelligence In Space. It Just Shows How Rare It Is Here On The Earth.

The Piece Of Equipment I'm Most Found Off Is My Telescope. The Other Night I Had A Superb View Of The Moon.

We Stand Now At The Turning Point Between Two Eras. Behind Us Is A Past To Which We Can Never Return... The Coming Of The Rocket Brought To An End A Million Years Of Isolation... The Childhood Of Our Race Was Over And History As We Know It Began.

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.

In My Life I Have Found Two Things Of Priceless Worth - Learning And Loving. Nothing Else - Not Fame, Not Power, Not Achievement For Its Own Sake - Can Possible Have The Same Lasting Value. For When Your Life Is Over, If You Can Say 'i Have Learned' And 'i Have Loved,' You Will Also Be Able To Say 'i Have Been Happy.

1. When A Distinguished But Elderly Scientist States That Something Is Possible, He Is Almost Certainly Right. When He States That Something Is Impossible, He Is Very Probably Wrong. 2. The Only Way Of Discovering The Limits Of The Possible Is To Venture A Little Way Past Them Into The Impossible. 3. Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic.

Impossible Things

It May Be That The Old Astrologers Had The Truth Exactly Reversed, When They Believed That The Stars Controlled The Destinies Of Men. The Time May Come When Men Control The Destinies Of Stars.

They Had Not Yet Attained The Stupefying Boredom Of Omnipotence; Their Experiments Did Not Always Succeed.

How Inappropriate To Call This Planet Earth When It Is Quite Clearly Ocean.

Isn't Killing People In The Name Of God A Pretty Good Definition Of Insanity?

I've Been Saying For A Long Time That I'm Hoping To Find Intelligent Life In Washington.

I Am An Optimist. Anyone Interested In The Future Has To Be Otherwise He Would Simply Shoot Himself.

I Have A Fantasy Where Ted Turner Is Elected President But Refuses Because He Doesn't Want To Give Up Power.

. . . 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.

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.

Politicians Should Read Science Fiction, Not Westerns And Detective Stories.

Trending Author

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Eldridge Cleaver

Category