"Perhaps they have been living there inside the Sun since the Universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom which we shall never scale. [...] One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle round their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life." (Arthur C Clarke," Out of the Sun", 1958)
"To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away - and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles." (Arthur C Clarke, "We'll Never Conquer Space", 1960)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"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." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"No equation, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"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." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it." (Arthur C Clarke, Voices from the Sky", 1965)
"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." (Arthur C Clarke, "Space and the Spirit of Man", 1965)
"Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them." (Arthur C. Clarke, "The Lost Worlds of 2001", 1972)
"Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them." (Arthur C. Clarke, "The Lost Worlds of 2001", 1972)
"Men have an extraordinary, and perhaps fortunate, ability to tune out of their consciousness the most awesome future possibilities." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)
"There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)
"There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)
"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, "The Light of Other Days", 2000)
"One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. (Arthur C Clarke)
No comments:
Post a Comment