Isaac Asimov Quotes

281 Sourced Quotes

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

Isaac Asimov
It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word intuition.

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
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov
Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

Isaac Asimov
When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Isaac Asimov
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Isaac Asimov
How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended.
Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Isaac Asimov
No physicist who is even marginally sane doubts the validity of special relativity.

Isaac Asimov
However glorious and vast the unimaginable depths of the universe, we cannot remain lost in its glories forever.

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

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

Isaac Asimov
The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

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

Isaac Asimov
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

Isaac Asimov
I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics — Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Isaac Asimov
The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own "national security" to be paramount above all other consideration.

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
A chipped pebble is almost part of the hand it never leaves. A thrown spear declares a sort of independence the moment it is released... The whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct control and more and more seem to have the beginning of a will of their own.

Isaac Asimov