It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he...
Now I understand, said the last man.
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to tal...
The Ramans do everything in threes.
That first Prime Monitor, he said, was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and a...
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
Is there intelligent life on Earth? Yours,
For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.
A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
My God -- it's full of stars!-Dave Bowman.
Humor was the enemy of desire.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.