Isaac Asimov Quotes

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

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

“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.”

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”

““You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.”
“Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry. The storm’s due tomorrow.”
Powell sighed wearily. “That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are based on assumptions and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. I’m going to bed.””

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

“All evil is good become cancerous.”

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

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

“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.”

“We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.”

“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.”

““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.””

“Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.”

“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”

“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”

“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.”

“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

“The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.”

“It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”

“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.”

“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”

“It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!”

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

“The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity”

“Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true.”

“Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one?
A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth?
A. I am.”

“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.”

“Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“… you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”

“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.”

“In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”

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

“Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters.”

“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.”

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

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

“Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.”

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

“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.”