Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence.
We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun’s children.
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.
For if not true, they are well imagined...
Science is the only religion of mankind.
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It’s completely impossible. 2- It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them – not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.
Humor was the enemy of desire.
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.