Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Isaac Asimov
That was the time to begin all-out preparations for war.
On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war.

Isaac Asimov
In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses.

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

Isaac Asimov
To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was system, an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-today bureaucracy was industry, indecision when right was caution, and blind stubbornness when wrong, determination.

Isaac Asimov
If an interaction is too weak to be detectable or to exert influence in any way, then by any operational definition, it doesn't exist.

Isaac Asimov
Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.

Isaac Asimov
On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again...on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward.

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
The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.

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
If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love — so what difference would it make?

Isaac Asimov
I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification...It's these respectable people here who create those hooligans out there.

Isaac Asimov
To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

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
I wish that I could say I was optimistic about the human race. I love us all, but we are so stupid and shortsighted that I wonder if we can lift our eyes to the world about us long enough not to commit suicide.

Isaac Asimov
It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

Isaac Asimov
Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located — so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation — there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

Isaac Asimov
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?

Isaac Asimov
I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.

Isaac Asimov
Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end.

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
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

Isaac Asimov
It is better to go to defeat with free will than to live in a meaningless security as a cog in a machine.

Isaac Asimov
Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency. -R. Daneel Olivaw

Isaac Asimov