Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Isaac Asimov, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Isaac Asimov quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 592 Isaac Asimov quotes for you to read and share.

Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000001116
After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000001903
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000011386
In memory yet green, in joy still felt,
The scenes of life rise sharply into view.
We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt,
And while all else is old, the world is new. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000027207
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000029395
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000033424
Humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000033941
It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000036924
Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line
even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000038694
However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There's no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference - but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000039930
We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000043919
I don't think I've ever held a racket in my hand ... There's got to be somebody in the US who isn't trying to play tennis and stinking up the court. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000045446
Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000045456
Education is something you can not finish. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000051498
I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000053522
Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.) -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000054093
Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000057260
I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: 'Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.' -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000058141
[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000062636
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000065272
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000073838
We must not be taken in by the myth of youth, the unending propaganda to the effect that young men are younger than old men; that they are better looking; that they are slimmer, stronger and more athletic; that they can hold a girl in more romantic fashion and speak more sweetly. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000078830
Life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000082968
It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000084264
[A]ll knowledge is one. When a light brightens and illuminates a corner of a room, it adds to the general illumination of the entire room. Over and over again, scientific discoveries have provided answers to problems that had no apparent connection with the phenomena that gave rise to the discovery. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000088970
All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000090432
The intruder was an obviously mature thirty, at least - quite elderly, in fact.) -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000091580
In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000095303
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000095347
The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000104712
I'm gradually managing to cram my mind more and more full of things. I've got this beautiful mind and it's going to die, and it'll all be gone. And then I say, not in my case. Every idea I've ever had I've written down, and it's all there on paper. And I won't be gone; it'll be there. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000118465
They work off all their resentments, enjoy all the smug self-satisfaction a young revolutionary would have, and by the time they take their place in the Imperial hierarchy, they are ready to settle down into conformity and obedience. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000120333
And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile - except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000127835
After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000138882
An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000144111
Even the purest and most high-minded scientist finds it expedient sometimes to assault the fortress of truth with the blunt weapon of trail and error. sometimes it works beautifully. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000149524
Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000149917
Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000150286
The human mind resents control. The ordinary human hypnotist cannot hypnotize a person against his will for that reason. I can, because I'm not a hypnotist, and, believe me, Pritcher, the resentment that you cannot show and do not even know you possess is something I wouldn't want to face." Pritcher -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000156148
The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000158866
There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000158871
The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000159603
The tyranny that now exists is actual. That which may exist in the future is potential. If we are always to draw back from change with the thought that the change may be for the worse, then there is no hope at all of ever escaping injustice. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000164303
On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again ... on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000168865
You wait for the war to happen like vultures. If you want to help, prevent the war. Don't save the remnants. Save them all. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000177749
He would do worse than his worst if he had to. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000182641
If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000185576
I don't subscribe to the thesis, 'Let the buyer beware,' I prefer the disregarded one that goes, 'Let the seller be honest.' -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000187475
There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000199239
Working ten hour days allows you to fall behind twice as fast as you could working five hour days. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000204835
Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000205063
The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000207017
And he paused, aware at last of the gathering weight of the silence. Fourteen images stared at him, without any of them offering a word in response.
Bakst said sharply, "You have talked of freedom. You have it!"
Then, uncertainly, he said, "Isn't that what you want? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000216887
I've seen many people with status, but I'm still looking for a happy one. Status won't sit still under you; you have to continually fight to keep from sinking. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000224518
Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000225128
In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000232269
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000241801
In the thirteenth century the Mongol armies perfected the art of the blitzkrieg with nothing more than shaggy ponies at their disposal. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000242336
Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000244792
It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000248793
Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.' I'm no god and I'll contend no longer. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000277575
Can't you try>? However useless the effort may seem to you to be, have you anything better to do with your life? Have you some worthier goal? Have you a purpose that will justify you in your own eyes to some greater extent? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000280656
Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000296913
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction
its essence
has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000300520
What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000300602
Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000303182
For a wise man, I have been told, once said, 'Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.' But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000306085
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. [The Second Law of Robotics] -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000307940
It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred! -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000307946
Concerning the blindness and bigotry of people, the pleasures of hatred rise superior even to the instinct of self-preservation. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000309980
The thanks of a weak one are but of little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way- and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite unseemly great. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000312047
The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect
but, nearly invariably, the stupidest. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000312613
You can't just move backward. You can't push the chicken back into the egg, wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don't just try to explain that he ought to do it - you offer him something he would rather have. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000314749
Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000315282
The essential building block is ... the true love that is impossible to define for those who have never experienced it and unnecessary to define for those who have. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000315788
Perhaps! Your opinions are yours, of course. Still you are rather young." Dryly. "It is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life. You became mayor of the city when you were two years younger than I am now. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000317716
Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000319497
Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn't matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000322435
Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000323725
It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000328864
Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000329443
A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000330571
From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the vagrant stars at the Galaxy's rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation influence. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000331228
A circle has no end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000334420
Never judge your own writing. You're not fit to do so. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000334464
It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000337877
Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000338113
But all life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000338148
Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000339186
Encyclopedias don't win wars. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000343623
It worked out neatly, yet it had all changed for him, and what was broken could not be made whole again. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000343952
First of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000344804
There is no merit to discipline under ideal circumstances. I must have it in the face of death or it is worthless. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000345425
Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrased at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000350896
Galaxy! When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000368400
Presumably, such is the folly of human beings, the prospects of intellectual suicide might not stop them from indulging their hatred, -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000368787
On Earth, we have a continuous influx of young people who are willing to change because they haven't had time to grow hard set in their ways. I suppose there's some optimum. A life long enough for real accomplishment and short enough to make way for youth at a rate that's not too slow. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000372515
Baley tried to picture a world as a sphere being lit and unlit as it turned. He found it hard to do and felt scornful of the so-superior Spacers who let such an essential thing as time be dictated to them by the vagaries of planetary movements. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000377518
Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000383028
Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000387938
Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a smattering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000410213
A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000411393
Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always
all you did for me."

-I did nothing for you."

-You loved me and your love made me
human. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000416226
Kill us in the clear light on the Moon, where the sky is black and soft, where the stars shine brightly, where the cleanliness and purity of vacuum make all things sharp.

- Not in this low-clinging, fuzzy blue. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000417061
Frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000421926
True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000423430
The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000439936
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000441832
In themselves, harmless. As a group, incredibly dangerous. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000442197
The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000448803
The world is being Americanized and technologized to its limits, and that makes it dull for some people. Reaching the Moon restores the frontier and gives us the lands beyond. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000452401
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000453472
What was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb; and once left, it could not be re-entered. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000454792
You're surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can't stand up under it. In the sleep period, you're free. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000461083
Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000461133
It might seem to you, Peter, that a truck driver, one step above an ape in your view, can't remember. But truck drivers can have brains, too. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000462176
And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000469308
(The word "robot" is from a Czech word meaning "compulsory labor.") -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000469789
People say 'It's as plain as the noise on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone hold a mirror up to you? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000477783
Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000482334
Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000484022
The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000487497
The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000488437
Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000492330
It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000493341
Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000494769
To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000496541
Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000499380
No vision of God and heaven ever experienced by the most exalted prophet can, in my opinion, match the vision of the universe as seen by Newton or Einstein -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000503446
It lasted for a long time, I believe."
"A very long time. It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000506531
I don't like anything that's got to be. I want to know why. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000508590
...the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.
There was nothing but confusion. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000508593
Finished products are for decadent minds. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000509658
It's just that old people always think young people haven't really learned about love; and young people think that old people have forgotten about love; and, you know, they're both wrong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000513891
Since emotions are few and reasons are many (said the robot Giscard) the behavior of a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000513897
Feminine intuition? Is that what you wanted the robot for? You men. Faced with a woman reaching a correct conclusion and unable to accept the fact that she is your equal or superior in intelligence, you invent something called feminine intuition. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000513911
You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000513914
If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000515818
One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000516578
There is no more desire to live past one's time than to die before it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000519619
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000525514
The men in this station survive by virtue of their jellyfish quality. There isn't one who would stand against him. Trying to rally the others to put pressure on "Hallam" would be like asking strands of cooked spaghetti to come to attention. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000527539
A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529124
The downtrodden are more religious than the satisfied. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529125
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529126
The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529127
You are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529128
No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529129
The elderly man, flushed with pleasure, was recounting in voluble fashion his experiences and impressions. His wife joined in periodically, with meticulous corrections involving completely unimportant points; these being given and taken in the best of humor. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529130
I shall not be alive a half decade hence," said Seldon, "and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, 'man. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529131
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529132
I tell you it's deadly when you start thinking your wife might be right. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529133
It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529134
And he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529135
Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529136
All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on "calculating machines" had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529137
I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529138
Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529139
A great many things are possible. And to himself he added: But not practical. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529140
History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529141
The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529142
The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529143
He's a pygmy with only one talent, the ability to convince others he's a giant." Lamont -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529144
The solar system consists of Jupiter, plus debris. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529145
The facts, gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529146
The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529147
This game the Persian Magi did invent, The force of Eastern wisdom to express: From thence to busy Europeans sent, And styled by modern Lombards pensive chess. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529148
I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529149
What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind's habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529150
You are a practical man, Elijah. You do not moon romantically over Earth's past, despite your healthy interest in it. Nor do you stubbornly embrace the City culture of Earth's present day. We felt that people such as yourself were the ones that could lead Earthmen to the stars once more. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529151
That is, he made boasts. But boasts are wind and deeds are hard. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529152
It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529153
[A]n unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529154
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529155
And as long as it is so believed, Procurator, and as long as we of Earth are treated as pariahs, you are going to find in us the characteristics to which you object. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529156
They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529157
Weak emperors mean strong viceroys. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529158
Love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529159
When I die I won't go to heaven or hell; there will just be nothingness. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529160
If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529161
To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529162
It has been said in this courtroom that only a human being can be free. It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529163
Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless - or even actually harmful. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529164
To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529165
Murray said, "Is this Heaven?"
The Voice said, "This is no place as you understand place."
Murray was embarrassed, but the next question had to be asked. "Pardon me if I sound like a jackass. Are you God? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529166
There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529167
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529168
Consider the question suitably modified. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529169
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.] -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529170
When they sat down at a small table and punched in their orders, -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529171
That's right, but it's not a mathematical proposition. It's a sociological observation
and there is always the possibility of exceptions to such observations. - Dr. Mandamus to Dr. Kelden Amadiro -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529172
A happy wall is a long-lived wall, a practical wall, a useful wall. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529173
Courtiers don't take wagers against the king's skill. There is the deadly danger of winning. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529174
Men identified themselves with the Century with which they were associated professionally. Its battles, all too often, became their own battles. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529175
The murky gray light of incipient dawn was cold not only in the poetical sense but also in a very literal way - and -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529176
We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529177
Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529178
The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529179
Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation! -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529180
We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects ... and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529181
The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529182
How many people is the earth able to sustain? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529183
Surely the relationship between inconveniences suffered and privileges granted was part of the very essentials of learning how to handle people without an explosion. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529184
The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529185
At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past . -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529186
The mistiness of distance hides the truth -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000529187
I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000530016
To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," and indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was "industry", indecision when right was "caution", and blind stubbornness when wrong, "determination. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000530108
I want to be a human being, nothing more and nothing less ... I don't suppose we can ever stop hating each other, but why encourage that by keeping the old labels with their ready-made history of millennial hate? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000536198
Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000536744
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000539408
Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000543574
There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000546433
Enough, my very noble husband. You had another of your vacillating consultations with your councilors. Fine advisors." With infinite scorn, "A herd of palsied purblind idiots hugging their sterile profits close to their sunken chests in the face of my father's displeasure. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000553138
Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000559938
Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000561778
The intelligent man is never bored. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000565916
Old people think young people haven't learned about love. Young people think old people have forgotten about love. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000568496
All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000569956
When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000571080
The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn't just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that
No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000572038
The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end. With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they would have crushed us. It is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000580800
I never considered myself a patriot. I like to think I recognize only humanity as my nation. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000582422
In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000583785
He supposed it was inevitable. Dip a person into one particular specialty deeply enough and long enough, and he would automatically begin to assume that specialists in all other fields were magicians, judging the depth of their wisdom by the breadth of his own ignorance ... -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000584284
Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000585416
Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions - not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000594174
The greatest inventors are unknown to us. Someone invented the wheel - but who? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000602024
diabolic perseverance -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000606662
I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters ... In between two of the segments she asked me ... "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?" I said, "Type faster. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000606987
The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000607025
It is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000612096
Oh, hell! I can't sleep!" "Neither can I! But I might as well try - as a matter of principle." Twelve hours later, sleep was still just that - a matter of principle, unattainable in practice. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000614369
His idiot face gets redder and his eyes bulge and his ears block. I'd say his mind stops functioning, but I lack the proof of any other state from which it might stop." Bronowski -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000614591
You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000617546
Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since medieval times, it was a woman's purse. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000626759
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000627981
The day of the week on which the tour took place was known to all workers. All devices in its path ought to have been carefully neutralized or locked, since it was unreasonable to expect human beings to withstand the temptation to handle knobs, keys, handles and pushbuttons. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000644201
Saying something is 'too bad' is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your business and not be interested anymore. It's a lot worse than 'too bad.' It's against everything decent and natural. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000646840
I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000647926
The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it's bad for you. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000649431
Self-education is a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000651950
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000653772
Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no
change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is
theirs. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000654950
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000658914
When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000666232
It's humbling to think that all animals, including human beings, are parasites of the plant world. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000667923
When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism IS a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000678300
People sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don't know how to fix themselves. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000684269
University President: Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers ... and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000696299
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000698243
I'm forty-nine, not fifteen, and I've made my peace with myself. Had I been handsome and stupid when I was fifteen, or twenty-one, as, at that time in life, I wished I had been, I would undoubtedly now no longer be handsome--but I'd still be stupid. So, in the long run, I've won out. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000700066
I'm being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000718587
The clown's eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. But they kept me away from you earlier-and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000724081
I am not responsible for what other people think. I am responsible only for what I myself think, and I know what that is. No idea I've ever come up with has ever struck me as a divine revelation. Nothing I have ever observed leads me to think there is a God watching over me. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000728553
There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000729049
The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000733810
I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000736405
It was almost inevitable. Those who worked directly for the Squires were only too glad to identify themselves with the rulers and make up for their real inferiority by a tighter adherence to the rules of segregation, a harsh and haughty attitude toward their fellows. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000752598
Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000757168
People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000757996
Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000758578
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000761199
He would have to ask questions constantly, take nothing for granted. There would be so many opportunities to miss the obvious, so many chances to misunderstand, so many ways of taking the wrong path. 11 -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000770193
Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one - Marie, the famous Madame Curie - and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000774828
Science is a set of rules to keep us from telling lies to each other. All scientists really have is a reputation for telling the truth. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000779480
What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine?" "You think my convictions are for sale?" "Why not?" came the cold response. "Isn't that your business, buying and selling?" "Only at a profit," said Mallow, -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000780405
Economics is on the side of humanity now. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000782225
Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000783829
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000784237
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000784984
Actually, they where the Simple-Lifers, hungering after a life, which to those who lived it had probably appeared not so Simple, and who had not been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000790868
You can't maintain discipline that way." Mallow said icily, "I can. There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in the face of death, or it's useless. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000791025
A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000796077
It's the writing that teaches you. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000797978
They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000801143
He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. "Back to oil and coal, are they?" he murmured - and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000805072
Behind a very sturdily built and staunchly defended facade of practical, unromantic hard-headedness towards life, there was just that little pool of softness that would never show if you poked for it, but could be reached if you knew just how - and never let on that you were looking for it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000805562
Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain".
"I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000807005
Only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000820835
Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task
such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping
I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000821488
Author's Note: This story starts with section 6. This is not a mistake. I have my own subtle reasoning. So, just read, and enjoy. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000825616
Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000831769
Boasts are wind and deeds are hard. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000836360
The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000837485
Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That's how long they have been growing plants and herding animals. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000841597
Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time."
"Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000843580
It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000847585
All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000864727
His honor, rests in the very actions that led to his conviction and death. It is beyond your power to add to or detract from it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000868397
I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000874046
Even at the time, [he] felt his anger to be out of proportion to the cause, but it represented an accumulation of resentment. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000877345
A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000880545
The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000884955
From my close observation of writers ... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000895228
A myth or legend is simply not made up out of a vacuum. Nothing is
or can be. Somehow there is a kernel of truth behind it, however distorted that might be. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000897264
Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000900174
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000919514
There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000921679
We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000922499
The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible ( ... ) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000928263
Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000937233
Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000943546
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason
if you pick the proper postulates. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000946209
She's qualified all right. She understands robots like a sister - comes from hating human beings so much, I think. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000949782
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000959089
I type 90 words per minute on the typewriter; I type 100 words per minute on the word processor. But, of course, I don't keep that up indefinitely - every once in a while I do have to think a few seconds. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000962054
For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000963137
He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000967195
So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000969696
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000971200
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000976993
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000978673
Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history : the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal "honor" and court etiquette. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000983911
If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000988447
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000990297
The vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000992674
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000992722
Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000994321
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000997619
I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification ... It's these respectable people here who create those hooligans out there. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 000999995
Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension! -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001000291
This idea [standardized time zones] was first advanced and fought for by Sandford Fleming of Canada and Charles F. Dowd of the United States. I mention them chiefly because like so many benefactors of mankind they have been rewarded by total obscurity. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001002220
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I'll tell you why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001002387
A persistent rumor has circulates in the USA: There are two intelligent races living on the surface of planet Earth: the standard people and the hungarians. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001006031
Scientists expect to be improved on and corrected; they hope to be -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001006544
Before another century is done it will be hard for people to imagine a time when humanity was confined to one world, and it will seem to them incredible that there was ever anybody who doubted the value of space and wanted to turn his or her back on the Universe. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001007354
Changelessness is decay."
"A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse."
"Changelessness is a change for the worse ... -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001007965
All of a sudden, space isn't friendly. All of a sudden, it's a place where people can die ... Many more people are going to die. But we can't explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can't do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001014813
They don't want equal time - they want all the time there is. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001019471
The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001021992
The spell of power never quite releases its hold. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001023291
Bible: Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behaviour which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001037928
I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001038194
Beliefs can't be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly complete mental discruption results. Mild cases - hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced cases - madness and suicide. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001038296
Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001039496
Clarke's First Law - Corollary: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001046885
Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001047505
Well, there is one - a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man whom they call the Mule." "The Mule?" She considered. "Ever hear of him, Torie? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001054996
Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001056064
There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001059897
It amounts to a diseased attitude - a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001061417
Is everything normal now?"
"Well he hasn't got religious mania, and he isn't running around in a circle
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he's normal." (45) -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001064889
I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001066019
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001067018
The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001077123
Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001078614
Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001078926
Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001085369
One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer, ... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001097462
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001098685
God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001102424
The fact of the matter is that young men lack skill and experience and are very likely to approach a girl as though she were a sack of wheat. It is the old man - suave, debonair, maturely charming - who knows exactly what to do and how to do it, and is therefore better at it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001113567
The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001122428
You lack the capacity to decipher this particular puzzle. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001123399
The dangers that face the world can, every one of them, be traced back to science. The salvations that may save the world will, every one of them, be traced back to science. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001124235
If we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will run better and, most of all, a world in which the individual will count for more, not less. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001127624
Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001129839
Here were the same long cold bare corridors, the same lowest common denominator of design and decoration, with every light source designed so as to irritate as few people as possible and to please just as few. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001150641
To insult someone we call him 'bestial'. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001152640
He who is needed must learn to endure flattery. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001156480
You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001158152
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001167557
Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001174694
Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001179150
With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001194358
All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001196210
So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001198127
George Weston, after all was only a man - poor thing - and his wife made full use of every device which a clumsier and more scrupulous sex has learned, with reason and futility, to fear. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001200516
Why is it, I wonder, that anyone who displays superior athletic ability is an object of admiration to his classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of hatred? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001205837
Meaning well is a poor defense, -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001206460
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001213443
All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001214104
If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001214973
Space, man, have you no respect for science? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001217076
There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001223324
Galaxy, he hated them! He stopped himself, drew a firm breath...There was no use thinking hate...He had learned to bear in silence. He ought not forget what he had learned now. Of all times, not now. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001227937
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001242528
Give us but the chance and a new generation of Earthmen would grow to maturity, lacking insularity and believing wholeheartedly in the oneness of Man. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001243902
It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001244255
She possesses what someone once described to me as all the unlovable virtues. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001245616
The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001245628
He's but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001257230
And in man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001260635
There are always individuals who pit their minds against the general modes of thought and who are arrogant enough to feel that they alone are right and that the many are wrong. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001272692
Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001275707
If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001284231
Arthur Clarke says that I am first in science and second in science fiction in accordance with an agreement we have made. I say he is first in science fiction and second in science. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001288398
That's the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that's what just science fiction is. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001289722
The cure for advanced gullibility is to go to sleep and consider matters again the next day. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001291488
There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatable with the greater, the lesser must give way. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001293466
To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001296545
Carbon is the basis of human life and iron of robot life. It becomes easy to speak of C/Fe when you wish express a culture that combines the best of the two on an equal but parallel basis. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001299157
You may uncover more and, eventually, what seems altogether a mystery to us now may unfold and become plain. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001301060
We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.'

'For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of you. I don't. I want more good ones. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001305016
I'm not a speed reader. I'm a speed understander. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001305857
Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001307601
The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001307774
It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001309417
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001314496
It's just science fiction so it's allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It's just science fiction, so it doesn't have to make sense. It's just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noises and flashing lights. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001322427
Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001323522
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001329215
That even the most casual of compliments can be given that extra little touch that women adore. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001338994
Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001361027
It's a poor atom blaster that won't point both ways. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001361121
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001367130
He never created a finish product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001369877
Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001374067
You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?"
"Notoriously not. Pioneers never are. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001374209
A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001383202
Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001386631
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001392390
I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001395419
To have good ideas, we need to consume good ideas too.
Follow your curiosity. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001408931
How harmful overspecialization is. It cuts knowledge at a million points and leaves it bleeding. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001409235
I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway". -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001412971
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001415860
Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001422445
And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story) -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001422446
My death, Daniel, is not important. No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001424374
A "simple aspect of science" may be defined as one which, through good fortune, I happen to understand. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001425283
The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001432166
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001435699
But emotion had come upon him after all. Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was just one. One person. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001437631
We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001447079
The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001447084
It is not important what can or cannot be done. What is important is what people will or will not believe can be done. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001447264
Happiness is doing it rotten your own way. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001450299
I wish that I could say I was optimistic about the human race. I love us all, but we are so stupid and shortsighted that I wonder if we can lift our eyes to the world about us long enough not to commit suicide. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001451299
But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar
systems. It had only one, function, administration; one purpose, government; and one manufactured product, law. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001453631
If it were evenly distributed," said Rodman, "the example of justice in the world might lead at last to a sane world policy. As it is, there is world despair and fury over the selfish fortune of a few, and all behave irrationally in revenge. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001458561
You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future
a good future, a useful future
and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001466465
A moving finger having once written could never be lured back to unwrite. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001472351
Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ... -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001477737
There is no Master but the Master," he said, "and QT-1 is his prophet. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001480013
Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001480034
Fifty before I come of age," he had exulted. "Who'll take the wager?" But -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001481505
You don't have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001486430
Past glories are poor feeding. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001489116
The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001489416
Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001492653
The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. Hari -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001495175
I have written 240 books on a wide variety of topics ... Some of it I based on education I received in my school, but most of it was backed by other ways of learning - chiefly in the books I obtained in the public library. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001500140
It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001500317
They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we're on our way. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001508095
I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001508318
The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001508478
He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001512583
Naturally, there's got to be a limit for I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001513311
There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001514802
Cleon II was Lord of the Universe. Cleon II also suffered from a painful and undiagnosed ailment. By the queer twists of human affairs, the two statements are not mutually exclusive, nor even particularly incongruous. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001516002
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001518619
Suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001522290
The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001522393
No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate
like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history
until it degenerates into fables. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001522751
Dors muttered to him, "Stop studying humanity. Be aware of your surroundings." "I'll try. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001528072
You don't need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001528932
To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001530897
If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001535686
It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001545949
Computerization eliminates the middleman -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001549234
To Mankind
And the hope that the war against folly
may someday be won after all. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001550933
Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001553094
Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001556128
The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001562911
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001567569
There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001568224
Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001573802
I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001575158
Every religion seems like a fantasy to outsiders, but as holy truth to those of the faith. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001596683
Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001608053
An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001608188
Scientists derive satisfaction from figuring out the puzzle. It's about the quest, not the grail. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001609963
Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked in school. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001610345
What would I do if I knew I only had six months to live?
Type faster. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001612627
Let us assume you've made your point. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001616763
No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001616985
Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001617728
Tens of millions of Americans who neither know or understand the actual arguments for, or even against, evolution, march in the Army of the Night with their Bibles held high -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001618183
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001620453
It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001625313
Since the forthcoming write-up of my Ph.D. dissertation was much in my mind, it was the work of a moment to begin a solemn dissertation containing all the stigmata of academic turgidity about a substance which dissolved in water 1.12 seconds before you added the water. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001628195
Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001629739
Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001630921
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001631616
Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another - sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself - while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001633410
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001634550
In fact, it was part of the Tyrannian military tradition that a little discomfort on the part of the soldier was good for discipline. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001636372
My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001639044
Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001639810
Psychohistory was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001647639
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism ... for testing your thoughts against the universe. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001653228
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001659492
Fighting and scars are part of a trader's overhead. But fighting is only useful when there's money at the end, and if I can get it without, so much the sweeter. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001662607
Rod from his pocket. The Earthman croaked, "That's a psychic probe." His words were slurred, -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001663000
Yet weren't all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?] -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001667062
Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001668245
Now why should there be a special word for a man with dark skin? There was no special word for a man with blue eyes, or large ears, or curly hair. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001677936
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny ... -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001678239
People live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001680247
The machines do not solve problems with greater insight than men do, only faster. Only faster! -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001680653
Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001687021
An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001691474
I'll take that challenge. It's a dead hand against a living will. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001692030
- It lacks glamour?
- It lacks mob emotion-appeal.
- Same thing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001696564
All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001696630
You are the only one responsible for your own wants. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001696763
Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me," he said, "then I would say this lady can not exist - for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001698087
Even as though dearest with th en humble and defenseless, thus shalt though be dealt with. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001698678
When one's home has a really excellent computer capable of reaching other computers anywhere in the Galaxy, one scarcely needs to budge, you know. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001698935
I'm a man of business. If it adds up to a plus mark, I'm for it. And -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001705132
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001707470
three ships lost in the same sector in the same year can't be accident, and -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001708584
Bel Riose traveled without escort, which is not what court etiquette prescribes -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001709892
He clearly knew how dangerous it was to have an excited twelve-year-old handling a powerful weapon. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001710092
Since I do not believe in so many things, it is not difficult for me to disbelieve in the Fall as well, so that I am entirely convinced I will be telling the truth to the people. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001712399
It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word intuition. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001714817
The great secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001717458
Darkness thickened and collapsed about him. Some of it never lifted again. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001717952
Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001719913
Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001722073
Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001729492
We are gaining the knowledge; science is giving us that. Now we need wisdom as well. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001735471
it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001736415
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001740219
lush and flagitious mistresses. It -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001740339
violence is the last resource of incompetence -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001744918
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001745144
There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001757074
The law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001757452
No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth ... -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001758246
And his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001761110
The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be allowed. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001762075
All evil is good become cancerous. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001762807
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001766716
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001771694
It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001777716
So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style." -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001786236
It could be considered that science, as science, had failed the outer worlds. To be reaccepted it would have to present itself in another guise - and it has done just that. It works out beautifully." "Interesting!" The mayor placed his arms around his -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001786932
It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001787942
A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001789329
I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it? -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001790008
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001792821
People think of education as something they can finish. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001793017
You can't assert an answer just because it's not something else. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001794464
Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001794839
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001795777
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001797104
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001797545
The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.) -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001797602
Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001800402
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001800403
Every man's position on Earth is restricted to the distance he can walk.'
The Last Trump -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001800404
There's probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001801733
To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001801874
The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001806987
All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001808176
While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001809560
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001809864
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001814347
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001814487
It is as much my job to prevent harm to mankind as a whole as yours is to prevent harm to man as an individual. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001818456
In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001819018
Custom is second nature. Be accustomed to a bald head, sufficiently accustomed, and hair on it would seem monstrous. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001821052
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001821415
Life is a successive symphony of losses. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001823722
Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001823945
Interregnum - between -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001824486
A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001826129
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001827945
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001829569
It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001831030
People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001831258
I don't believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001836690
The stars, like dust, encircle me
In living mists of light;
And all of space I seem to see
In one vast burst of sight -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001839679
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001841443
Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001847507
Centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001851432
I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001851933
Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn't make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001853614
If you ask for too much, you lose even that which you have. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001855910
My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job
that he isn't worth discussing. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001858510
But he no longer feared the fear! It was not something to run from, that fear, but something to fight. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001864105
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001865704
Having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001869404
Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001869845
Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001870312
flagitious mistresses. It was -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001871753
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001874437
There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001875979
You don't beat refusal to believe in a frontal attack. -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes : pic 001878658
Education isn't something you can finish -- Isaac Asimov