Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past.

Isaac Asimov
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

Isaac Asimov
Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life—which is fundamentally dependent on light—to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.

Isaac Asimov
He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't believe in it at all.

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

Isaac Asimov
You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.

Isaac Asimov
I don't subscribe to the thesis, 'Let the buyer beware,' I prefer the disregarded one that goes, 'Let the seller be honest.'

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
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.

Isaac Asimov
If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain-moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Isaac Asimov
The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect—but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.

Isaac Asimov
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Isaac Asimov
Every religion seems like a fantasy to outsiders, but as holy truth to those of the faith.

Isaac Asimov
Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me, he said, then I would say this lady can not exist — for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.

Isaac Asimov
If there is a misuse of power, it is on her part. My crime is that I have never labored to make myself popular — I admit that much — and I have paid too little attention to fools who are old enough to be senile but young enough to have power.

Isaac Asimov
Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among my friends to protect me against my own lack of sophistication. I don't mind. I suspect that I am never quite as unsophisticated as they think I am, but I don't mind.

Isaac Asimov
You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.

Isaac Asimov
So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.

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

Isaac Asimov
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.

Isaac Asimov
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.

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
He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

Isaac Asimov
It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word intuition.

Isaac Asimov
But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.

Isaac Asimov
It is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim.

Isaac Asimov
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."

Isaac Asimov
Secrecy as deep as this is past possibility without nonexistence as well.

Isaac Asimov
An atom blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.

Isaac Asimov
The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Isaac Asimov