Isaac Asimov: Trending quotes (page 2)

As quoted in Notes for a Memoir : On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing (2006) by Janet Jeppson Asimov, p. 58
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Variant: Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Context: If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Part IV, The Traders, section 1; originally published as “The Wedge” in Astounding (October 1944)
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation (1951)

"A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek (21 January 1980) http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
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Context: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has 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."

Source: Pebble in the Sky

Attributed in the "quote of the day" source code of the “Fortune” computer program (June 1987); more at "The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s funny …’" at Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/
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"Science Past, Science Future" (1975) p. 208
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Doctor Susan Calvin in "Robot Dreams" in Robot Dreams (1986)
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Context: There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved.

Source: I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), Ch. 8, Library
Context: 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. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

" The Planet that Wasn't http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm" originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1975)
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Context: 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.

Source: The Roving Mind (1983), Ch. 25
Context: How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Interview by Bill Moyers on Bill Moyers' World Of Ideas (21 October 1988); transcript http://www-tc.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/print/pdfs/woi%20asimov2.pdf (pages 5-6)
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Context: Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's 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. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

The New Hugo Winners: Award-winning Science Fiction Stories Vol. 1 (1989)<!-- Afterword to "Speech Sounds" -->, p. 215
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Context: We are meant to know, or we are amoebae.
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. It is better to know — even if the knowledge endured only for the moment that comes before destruction — than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994)
Context: 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.
I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

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Source: "My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock;
Context: 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 everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Chapter 8 “Farmwoman” section 5, p. 154