Frasi di Arthur C. Clarke

pagina 4

“Ogni tecnologia sufficientemente avanzata è indistinguibile dalla magia.”

“Se qualcuno capisce il film alla prima visione, allora abbiamo fallito nel nostro intento.”

“Lenin è stato sfortunato; è nato cent'anni troppo presto. Il comunismo sovietico avrebbe potuto funzionare, almeno per un po', se avesse avuto un microchip. E sarebbe riuscito a evitare Stalin.”

“L'unica maniera di scoprire i limiti del possibile è di oltrepassarli e finire nell'impossibile.”

“Dietro ogni uomo oggi vivente stanno trenta spettri, poiché questo è il rapporto con il quale i morti superano il numero dei vivi. Dagli albori del tempo, grosso modo cento miliardi di uomini hanno camminato sul pianeta Terra. Orbene, è questo un numero interessante, in quanto, per una coincidenza bizzarra, esistono approssimativamente cento miliardi di stelle nel nostro universo locale, la Via Lattea. Così, per ogni uomo che abbia vissuto, in questo universo splende una stella.”

“Ora sono un esperto scientifico; ciò significa che non so nulla di assolutamente tutto.”

“Inoltre, avevano fatto il primo passo verso un'amicizia genuina. Si erano scambiati vulnerabilità.”

“Più meravigliosi sono i mezzi di comunicazione, più i suoi contenuti sembrano essere banali, osceni o deprimenti.”

“Non faccio finta di avere tutte le risposte. Ma vale sicuramente la pena pensare alle domande ...”

“As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.”

“Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.”

“We always thought the living earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.”

“It is later than you think. May it not be true for this Sundial.”

“What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control.”

“They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.”

“After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on the ascertainable facts.”

“I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind? And, although I do not necessarily agree with the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's advocacy of evolution as a major proof of the glory of God, de Chardin's attitude is both logical and inspiring. A creator who laid the foundations for the entire future at the beginning of time is far more awesome than a clumsy tinkerer who constantly modifies his creations and throws away entire species in the process.”

“Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.”

“The best proof that there’s intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn’t come here.”

“The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania.
Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.
The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live.”

“If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble…But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.”

“There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.”

“SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.”

“We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

“As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!”

“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”

“Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.”

“I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.”

“We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.”

“Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death…”

“A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.”

“Clarke's Fourth Law: For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

“There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come.”

“I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..”

“I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.”