Isaac Asimov Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Isaac Asimov

#4. 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

#5. When I die I won't go to heaven or hell; there will just be nothingness.

Isaac Asimov

#6. 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

#7. At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past .

Isaac Asimov

#8. 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

#9. We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.

Isaac Asimov

#10. 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

#11. The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.

Isaac Asimov

#12. 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

#13. Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Isaac Asimov

#14. ...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

#15. 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

#16. It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible.

Isaac Asimov

#17. 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

#18. Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.

Isaac Asimov

#19. I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.

Isaac Asimov

#20. All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.

Isaac Asimov

#21. A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

Isaac Asimov

#22. 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

#23. Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

Isaac Asimov

#24. Education isn't something you can finish

Isaac Asimov

#25. When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.

Isaac Asimov

#26. 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

#27. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete

Isaac Asimov

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it.

Isaac Asimov

#32. 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

#33. Dors muttered to him, "Stop studying humanity. Be aware of your surroundings." "I'll try.

Isaac Asimov

#34. She's qualified all right. She understands robots like a sister - comes from hating human beings so much, I think.

Isaac Asimov

#35. 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

#36. He would do worse than his worst if he had to.

Isaac Asimov

#37. 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

#38. Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing.

Isaac Asimov

#39. 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

#40. The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.

Isaac Asimov

#41. In the thirteenth century the Mongol armies perfected the art of the blitzkrieg with nothing more than shaggy ponies at their disposal.

Isaac Asimov

#42. 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

#43. THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Isaac Asimov

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.

Isaac Asimov

#47. 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

#48. I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere.

Isaac Asimov

#49. 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

#50. The machines do not solve problems with greater insight than men do, only faster. Only faster!

Isaac Asimov

#51. 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

#52. The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.

Isaac Asimov

#53. It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word intuition.

Isaac Asimov

#54. 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

#55. Changelessness is decay."
"A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse."
"Changelessness is a change for the worse ...

Isaac Asimov

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Presumably, such is the folly of human beings, the prospects of intellectual suicide might not stop them from indulging their hatred,

Isaac Asimov

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Life is a successive symphony of losses.

Isaac Asimov

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers.

Isaac Asimov

#72. violence is the last resource of incompetence

Isaac Asimov

#73. Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.

Isaac Asimov

#74. There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

Isaac Asimov

#75. Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Isaac Asimov

#76. 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

#77. A circle has no end.

Isaac Asimov

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

Isaac Asimov

#79. Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

Isaac Asimov

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. Rod from his pocket. The Earthman croaked, "That's a psychic probe." His words were slurred,

Isaac Asimov

#83. I'm being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime.

Isaac Asimov

#84. 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

#85. You can't assert an answer just because it's not something else.

Isaac Asimov

#86. Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

Isaac Asimov

#87. Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

Isaac Asimov

#88. It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

Isaac Asimov

#89. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. Hari

Isaac Asimov

#90. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Isaac Asimov

#91. People live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.

Isaac Asimov

#92. There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

Isaac Asimov

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

Isaac Asimov

#97. I'll take that challenge. It's a dead hand against a living will.

Isaac Asimov

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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