People go through four stages before any revolutionary development: 1. It’s nonsense, don’t waste my time. 2. It’s interesting, but not important. 3. I always said it was a good idea. 4. I thought of it first.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
The rash assertion that “God made man in His own image” is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias – boredom.
There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.
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.