Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.

I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents

Afrikaans is one of the world's best languages in which to curse; even when spoken politely, it can bruise innocent bystanders.

Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference.

The Dean's complaining to his Faculty. "Why do you scientists need such expensive equipment? Why can't you be like the Math Department, which only needs a blackboard and a wastepaper basket? Better still, like the Department of Philosophy. That doesn't even need a wastepaper basket…

The origin of the universe might be forever unknown, but all that had happened after obeyed the laws of physics

The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer

They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated.

Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service—in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It

It goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.

The crisis was over. What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

The familiar can be as shocking as the strange—when it is in the wrong place.

Otsusta minu üle mu tegude järgi, ehkki neid on vähe, mitte mu sõnade järgi, kuigi neid on palju.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. "If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress.

Whatever their origin, the human race was fortunate to have seen such a wonder; it could exist for only a brief moment of time in the history of the Solar System.

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

They were, perhaps, as contented as any race the world had known, and after their fashion they were happy. They spent their long lives amid beauty that had never been surpassed, for the labour of millions of centuries had been dedicated to the glory of Diaspar.

it was an accident—that had killed Frank Poole.

there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: "Where do we go from here?

The world's history was a mass of such disconnected threads, and none could say which were important and which were trivial.

It had to happen to someone. There is nothing exceptional about you, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served

Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.

The mind has many watchdogs; sometimes they bark unnecessarily, but a wise man never ignores their warning.