Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

What would you consider a good job?" Answered as follows: "A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money." When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made.

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

Isaac Asimov
A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

Isaac Asimov
Curiosity, the overwhelming desire to know, is not characteristic of dead matter. Nor does it seem to be characteristic of some forms of living organism, which, for that very reason, we can scarcely bring ourselves to consider alive.

Isaac Asimov
He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

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
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Isaac Asimov
I never considered myself a patriot. I like to think I recognize only humanity as my nation.

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
Pelorat sighed. I will never understand people.
There's nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. We're in no way different ourselves... You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.

Isaac Asimov
Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

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

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

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
If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.

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
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

Isaac Asimov