Isaac Asimov Quotes

A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.

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.'

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.

I never considered myself a patriot. I like to think I recognize only humanity as my nation.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

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.

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.

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.

It is change continuing change, inevitable change that is the dominant factor in society today.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

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]

I'm not a speed reader. I'm a speed understander.

The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.

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.

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.

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.

Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough?

Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty.

There is no more desire to live past one's time than to die before it.

Boasts are wind and deeds are hard.

The spell of power never quite releases its hold.

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity

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.

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.

Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’

Finished products are for decadent minds.

I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.

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

A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

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.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

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.

It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests.

It’s a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways.

The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life.

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

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.

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.

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.

The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.

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.

Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe.

Education isn't something you can finish

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.

Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.