Isaac Asimov Quotes
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There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't.
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There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.
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The spell of power never quite releases its hold.
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'Such unsubtle escapism! Really, Dr. Fara, such folly smacks of genius. A lesser mind would be incapable of it.'
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There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
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A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
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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.
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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.
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Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.
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You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.
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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.
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There’s nothing like deduction. We’ve determined everything about our problem but the solution.
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Books … hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.
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I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
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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.
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There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved.
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Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.
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'You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason-if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.'
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Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
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Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.
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The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.
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'It is a mistake,' he said, 'to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.'
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I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
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Plowboy: You truly feel that all the major changes in history have been caused by science and technology?