When in doubt, say nothing and move on.
Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.
There’s an ancient philosophical joke that’s much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be?
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
The time has come, said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers.
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.
Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that existed before the coming of the overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism, perhaps the most peculiar of all re...
My dear Rikki, Karellen retorted, it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.
Discovery was no longer a happy ship.
And even if Einstein could not be defied, he might be evaded. Those who sponsored this view talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hy...
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.
If it really was brilliant I’d have thought of it already.
They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.
There was awe, and there was also incredulity—sheer disbelief that the dead Moon, of all worlds, could have sprung this fantastic surprise.
The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.
Personally, I refuse to drive a car - I won't have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can't read.
One hemisphere was a giant bull’s-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.