Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, a...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme....
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.
(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked...
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 c...
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is esc...
He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sa...
One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
..the happy hum of humanity.
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.
All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.