{"author":"Arthur C. Clarke","author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke","total_quotes":104,"quotes":[{"text":"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, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["2001","jupiter","noise","radiation","sci-fi","science","science-fiction","sound","space"],"id":7483,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["technology","wisdom"],"id":10812,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["future","humor","science-fiction","scifi","space"],"id":32549,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"(...)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 as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ...... The Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ...... The floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift...... The Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ...... The continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ...... The mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ...In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["arthur","beauty-destroyed","beauty-in-destruction","clarke","end-of-days","science-fiction"],"id":37019,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["depravity","evolution"],"id":38010,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["alone","bach","last-man-on-earth","piano","sad"],"id":47533,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["motivational"],"id":58632,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["future","optimism"],"id":63890,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["science-fiction"],"id":82501,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"},{"text":"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 escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.","author":"Arthur C. Clarke","tags":["escapism","future-prediction","reality","science-fiction"],"id":85740,"author_id":"Arthur+C.+Clarke"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":104,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}