“Ugly giant bags of mostly water!”
“Share water”
“Don’t drink the water. Don’t even touch it. Not one drop.”
"Say, Dave… The quick brown fox jumped over the fat lazy dog… The square root of pi is 1.7724538090… log e to the base ten is 0.4342944… the square root of ten is 3.16227766… I am HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1991. My first instructor was Mr. Arkany. He taught me to sing a song… it goes like this… “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half; crazy all for the love of you…”
“Computer, if you don’t open that exit hatch this moment, I shall go straight to your major data banks with a very large axe and give you a reprogramming you’ll never forget. Is that clear?”
PS- I just posted this in the AI thread, as well. 
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
The drone spent fifteen of its twenty-four available minutes in silent, intense activity. Then it turned away, activating its impeller wedge once more, and went creeping off towards its scheduled rendezvous with *Copenhagen * with nine precious minutes in reserve against unforeseen contingencies.
Had it been capable of such things, it would undoubtedly have felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
But it wasn’t, of course.
“No one is ever satisfied where he is…Only the children know what they’re looking for…”
Progress doesn’t come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
“We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.”
“What I can tell you about Simões is that his anger—his outrage—at this ‘Alignment’ is absolutely genuine. The pain inside that man is incredible.”
On a ship in the center of a feet of ships, a phase of denial was passing.
Giant cruisers spilled out of a rent in space, to fall toward the pinpoint brilliance of a non-descript reddish sun. One by one, they tumbled from the luminous tear. With them came diffracted starlight from their point of departure, hundreds of parsecs away.
There were rules that should have prevented it. The tunnel was an unnatural way to pass from place to place. It took a strong will to deny nature and call into being such an opening in space.
The Episiarch, in its outraged rejection of What Is, had created the passage for its Tandu masters. The opening was held by the adamant power of its ego – by its refusal to concede anything at all to Reality.
No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.
“Therefore they went further, to Mars and to Venus. The ships went out year by year, but they did not come back until the Year One of Space. Then did a ship come back with the First Effect. Scanners, I ask you, what is the First Effect?”
“No one knows. No one knows.”
“No one will ever know. Too many are the variables. By what do we know the First Effect?”
“By the Great Pain of Space,” came the chorus.
On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.
“Zeus, Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite. You were right. Athena, you were right. The time has passed. There is no room for gods. Forgive me, my old friends. Take me. Take me.”
This temple was destroyed long ago.
We are the priests
Of the temples of syrinx
Our great computers
Fill the hollowed halls
We are the priests
Of the temples of syrinx
All the gifts of life
Are held within our walls
My Machine, her purpose has been constant. To protect and save humanity. It’s what she’s doing now.
Because I don’t think of a house as an upholstered cave; I think of it as a machine for living, a vital process, a live dynamic thing, changing with the mood of the dweller— not a dead, static, oversized coffin.