Isaac Asimov - History Quotes

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I have always dealt with economic forces, rather than philosophic forces, but you can't split history into neat little non-overlapping divisions. For instance, religions tend to accumulate wealth when successful and that eventually tends to distort the economic development of a society.

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
Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal honor and court etiquette.

Isaac Asimov
Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate — like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history — until it degenerates into fables.
Pelorat said, We historians are familiar with the process, Dom. There is a certain preference for the fable. The falsely dramatic drives out the truly dull.

Isaac Asimov
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

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

Isaac Asimov
Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

Isaac Asimov
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

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

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