A water heater is made to heat and hold water. It is begging you to do something that will change your life from gray to bright white: turn up the temperature!
Jeffrey Tucker, Hack Your Shower Head Plus 10 Other Ways to Get Big Government Out of Your Home (2012)
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke, as quoted in Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Michio Kaku, p. 295
Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony . . . they shoot for the baroque.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS (1981).
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
Mary Shelley, from the Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
If you think this world is bad, you should see some of the others.
Philip K. Dick, the title of a 1977 speech published in the collection The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Often improved by swapping out “world” with “universe,” but this seems not to be authentic.
There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979).
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
Brian Aldiss, “Apéritif” in Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s (1990).
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Maelstrom II” (1965).
Eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. They immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. Their first instinct was caution. When a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. It is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right.
Murray Leinster, The Wailing Asteroid (1960), Chapter 3 (pp. 32–33).
Reality is what trips you up when you walk around with your eyes closed.
F. Paul Wilson, Healer (1976).