Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line--even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.

Isaac Asimov
Beginning students of chemistry often think of the science as a mere collection of disconnected data to be memorized by brute force. Not at all! Just look at it properly and everything hangs together and makes sense. Of course, getting the hang of the proper look isn't always easy.

Isaac Asimov
If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable.

Isaac Asimov
The process of science... involves a slow forward movement through the reachable portions of the Universe — a gradual unfolding of parts of the mystery.

Isaac Asimov
Science must not be viewed as a mysterious black box out of which came toys and goodies, for that way laymen would view scientists as a kind of lab-coated priesthood — and, eventually, fear and hate them.

Isaac Asimov
Once we learn to expect theories to collapse and to be supplanted by more useful generalizations, the collapsing theory becomes not the gray remnant of a broken today, but the herald of a new and brighter tomorrow.

Isaac Asimov
Science will not stand still. It is a panorama that subtly dissolves and changes even while we watch. It cannot be caught in its every detail at any one moment of time without leaving us behind at once.

Isaac Asimov
We must remember that measures were made for man and not man for measures.

Isaac Asimov
We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth-if such a thing can even be said to exist.

Isaac Asimov
If we assume the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent being, one that knows and can do absolutely everything, then to my own very limited self, it would seem that existence for it would be unbearable. Nothing to wonder about? Nothing to ponder over? Nothing to discover? Eternity in such a heaven would surely be indistinguishable from hell.

Isaac Asimov
You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

Isaac Asimov
There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.

Isaac Asimov
How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

Isaac Asimov
Reaching the moon by three-man vessels in one long bound from Earth is like casting a thin thread across space. The main effort, in the coming decades, will be to strengthen this thread; to make it a cord, a cable, and, finally, a broad highway.

Isaac Asimov
The orchard of science is a vast globe-encircling monster, without a map, and known to no one man; indeed, to no group of men fewer than the whole international mass of creative scientists. Within it, each observer clings to his own well-known and well-loved clump of trees. If he looks beyond, it is usually with a guilty sigh.

Isaac Asimov
The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate

Isaac Asimov
There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream.

Isaac Asimov
To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable.

Isaac Asimov
Why is it, I wonder, that anyone who displays superior athletic ability is an object of admiration to his classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of hatred?

Isaac Asimov
Increasing knowledge leads not to conquest only, but to utter defeat as well, for one learns not only of new potentialities, but also of new limitations.

Isaac Asimov
The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

Isaac Asimov
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.

Isaac Asimov
A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.

Isaac Asimov
The tyranny that now exists is actual. That which may exist in the future is potential. If we are always to draw back from change with the thought that the change may be for the worse, then there is no hope at all of ever escaping injustice.

Isaac Asimov
Unless we are willing to settle down into a world that is our prison, we must be ready to move beyond Earth...

Isaac Asimov
As we trace the development of man over the ages, it seems in many respects a tale of glory and victory; of the development of the brain; of the discovery of fire, of the building of cities and of civilization; of the triumph of reason; of the filling of the Earth and the reaching out to sea and space.

Isaac Asimov
Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrassed at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned.

Isaac Asimov
Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

Isaac Asimov
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well)... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.

Isaac Asimov
It is one thing to be able to make predictions. It is another to listen to the predictions you have made and to act upon them.

Isaac Asimov