Aphorisms by Arthur Charles Clarke

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So it will be with us as we spread out from Earth, loosening the bonds of kinship and understanding, hearing faint and belated rumors at second, or third, or thousandth hand of an ever dwindling fraction of the entire human race. Though the Earth will try to keep in touch with her children, in the end all the efforts of her archivists and historians will be defeated by time and distance, and the sheer bulk of material. For the numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.

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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.

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Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination, for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

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And now, within one incredible generation, all this has changed.

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The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

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We have left the realm of comprehension in our vain effort to grasp the scale of the universe; so it must ever be, sooner rather than later.

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

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The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

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Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.

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Our age is in many ways unique, full of events and phenomena that never occurred before and can never happen again. They distort our thinking, making us believe that what is true now will be true forever, though perhaps on a larger scale. Because we have annihilated distance on this planet, we imagine that we can do it once again. The facts are otherwise, and we see them more clearly if we forget the present and turn our minds towards the past.