Isaac Asimov quotes:

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  • The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

  • The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

  • Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

  • People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

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

  • 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.

  • If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

  • Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

  • 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.

  • The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.

  • I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

  • True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

  • The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

  • Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

  • To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

  • You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.

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

  • 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.

  • People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

  • How to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education.If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war that war itself?

  • If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.

  • Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

  • [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.

  • We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects...and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.

  • Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

  • 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.

  • 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." This was widely quoted, but the "six months" was changed to "six minutes," which bothered me. It's "six months.

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

  • 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.

  • It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

  • I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.

  • Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy.

  • Boasts are wind and deeds are hard.

  • The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

  • Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation.

  • In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

  • It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.

  • That's the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that's what just science fiction is.

  • Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

  • People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.

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

  • At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.

  • Courtiers don't take wagers against the king's skill. There is the deadly danger of winning.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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".

  • Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

  • The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

  • Fertility is hereditary. If your parents didn't have any children, neither will you. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

  • If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

  • 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.

  • There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.

  • I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.

  • The law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.

  • Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

  • [O]ur statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

  • I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

  • 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.

  • Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise-even in their own field.

  • 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.

  • It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills.

  • When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

  • 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.

  • Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny...

  • Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature.

  • The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

  • As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived.

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

  • 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.'

  • ...democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.

  • 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.

  • I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

  • My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing.

  • To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

  • 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.

  • It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. 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. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

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

  • There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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.

  • The energy requirements for interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades. If they want to make contact, they would make contact; if not, they would save their energy and go elsewhere.

  • To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable about enjoying the good things.

  • It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

  • I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

  • Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

  • 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.

  • If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

  • Computerization eliminates the middleman

  • Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

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

  • Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.

  • Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.

  • Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end.

  • 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.

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

  • 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

  • If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

  • Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket.

  • I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.

  • The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

  • I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

  • In life, people will take you at your own reckoning.

  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

  • 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.

  • There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

  • Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.

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