Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
The difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labour.
Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
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 more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.
Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.
When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.
Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.
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.
I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.
The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.
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 universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
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.
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.
All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.
That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.
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?
SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.
Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough.
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 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.