Quotes About Progress

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.

We're particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10—the first man-made object to escape from the Solar System.

The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools.

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

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

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

Evolution and science had come to the same answers; and the work of Nature had lasted longer. At

The long-heralded global village is almost upon us, but it will last for only a flickering moment in the history of mankind. Before we even realise that it has come, it will be superseded – by the global family.

The future is built on the rubbish of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it.

Yet among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: "Where do we go from here?

Hal (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough.

They no longer formed a single group, united in the common cause of survival. Now their lives had diverged again into a score of independent aims and ambitions. Humanity had swallowed them up once more, and the ocean swallows a raindrop.

I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn's excellent rule: 'If you gotta message, use Western Union.' This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.

One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water.

Magic is just science we haven't figured out yet

My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it's proving.' Bisesa studied him. 'You'll have to tell me about your father.

And as for the Council—tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.' The

Arthur C. Clarke

Trvalo nÄ›kolik tisíc let, než lidstvo pÃ…â"¢iÅ¡lo na to, že existuje nÄ›kolik zamÄ›stnání, která by nemÄ›li zastávat lidé, kteÃ…â"¢í se o nÄ› dobrovolnÄ› hlásí, a obzváÅ¡tÄ› tehdy, když projevují pÃ…â"¢íÅ¡iÅ¡né nadÅ¡ení.

Jede hinreichend fortschrittliche Technologie ist von Magie nicht zu unterscheiden

The point, you see, is not the answers themselves, but the mental development we enjoy through striving for those answers.

Isn't that human nature? Most of the time we want it to be better. When it's as good as it can be, we want it to last forever)

He had lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little Columbus as it surpassed the log canoes of paleolithic man. [...] All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone.

Nothing is deader than yesterday's science-fiction— and Verne belongs to the day before yesterday.