Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

Although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the Universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.

Isaac Asimov
Special relativity is so much a part not only of physics but of everyday life, that it is no longer appropriate to view it as the special "theory" of relativity. It is a fact.

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

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
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written

Isaac Asimov
To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable about enjoying the good things.

Isaac Asimov
I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.

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

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

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

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

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
Only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.

Isaac Asimov
There are fashions in science as in everything else. Conduct an experiment that brings about an unusual success and before you can say, "There are a dozen imitations!" there are a dozen imitations!

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
The human brain is the most magnificently organized lump of material in the known universe.

Isaac Asimov
Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

Isaac Asimov
The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However... the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen... and you will hear the creaking.

Isaac Asimov
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

Isaac Asimov
I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

Isaac Asimov
I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: 'Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.'

Isaac Asimov
Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

Isaac Asimov
In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

Isaac Asimov