Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.

Isaac Asimov
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

Isaac Asimov
Ponyets! They sent you?
Pure chance, said Ponyets, bitterly, or the work of my own personal malevolent demon.

Isaac Asimov
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.

Isaac Asimov
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

Isaac Asimov
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written

Isaac Asimov
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.

Isaac Asimov
Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal honor and court etiquette.

Isaac Asimov
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

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

Isaac Asimov
Just you think first, and don't bother to speak afterward, either.

Isaac Asimov
Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris.

Isaac Asimov
The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.

Isaac Asimov
There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

Isaac Asimov
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

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

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

Isaac Asimov
Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

Isaac Asimov
I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway".

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

Isaac Asimov
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov
Is not all this an extraordinary concatenation of coincidence?
Pelorat said, If you list it like that—
List it any way you please, said Trevize. I don't believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.

Isaac Asimov
There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.

Isaac Asimov
Miniaturization doesn't actually make sense unless you miniaturize the very atoms of which matter is composed. Otherwise a tiny brain in a man the size of an insect, composed of normal atoms, is composed of too few atoms for the miniaturized man to be any more intelligent than the ant. Also, miniaturizing atoms is impossible according to the rules of quantum mechanics.

Isaac Asimov
Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward.

Isaac Asimov