Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Isaac Asimov
Science with all its faults has brought education and the arts to more people — a larger percentage — than has ever existed before science. In that respect it is science that is the great humanizer. And, if we are going to solve the problems that science has brought us, it will be done by science and in no other way.

Isaac Asimov
Custom is second nature. Be accustomed to a bald head, sufficiently accustomed, and hair on it would seem monstrous.

Isaac Asimov
The Tyranni rule fifty worlds; they are outnumbered hundreds to one. In such a position, simple force is insufficient. Devious methods, intrigue, assassination are their specialties. The net they weave across space is a wide one, and close-meshed. I can well believe that it extends across five hundred light-years to Earth.

Isaac Asimov
What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Isaac Asimov
True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

Isaac Asimov
I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Isaac Asimov
Scientific theories have a tendency to fit the intellectual fashions of the time.

Isaac Asimov
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.

Isaac Asimov
If it is exciting to probe the unknown and shed light on what was dark before, then more and more excitement surely lies ahead of us.

Isaac Asimov
Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference.

Isaac Asimov
You don't have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten.

Isaac Asimov
It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial.

Isaac Asimov