“We are meant to know, or we are amoebae.”

— Isaac Asimov

The New Hugo Winners: Award-winning Science Fiction Stories Vol. 1 (1989), p. 215
General sources
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.

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Isaac Asimov 303

American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992

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