Isaac Asimov Quotes
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Remarkable what a fragile flower romance is. A gun with a nervous operator behind it can spoil the whole thing.
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SWA Magazine: Talking about spacecraft, what do you think about the shuttle program?
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Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.
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He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.
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Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.
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To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was 'system,' an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was 'industry,' indecision when right was 'caution,' and blind stubbornness when wrong, 'determination.'
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If anyone can be considered the greatest writer who ever lived, it is Shakespeare.
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A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!
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It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
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In my fiction I am careful to make everything probable and to tie up all loose ends. Real life is not hampered by such considerations.
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It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.
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All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary
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It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word 'intuition.'
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For man to become successful, for man to establish himself as the ruler of the planet, it was necessary for him to use his brain as something more than a device to make the daily routine of getting food and evading enemies a little more efficient. Man had to learn to control his environment.'
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The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.
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Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead.
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Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.
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Asimov: I don't know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home-in story after story-the notion that life is going to be different.
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The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: 'No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.'
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But suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?
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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.'
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Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.
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The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.
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'Science Fiction, 1938' Nebula Winners 14 (1980) edited by Frederick J. Pohl, p. 97