Isaac Asimov - Human Quotes

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You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.

Isaac Asimov
Human beings are very conservative in some ways and virtually never change numerical conventions once they grow used to them. They even come to mistake them for laws of nature.

Isaac Asimov
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well)... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.

Isaac Asimov
In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process

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

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

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
You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

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
The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.

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
The three fundamental Rules of Robotics…One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm…Two…a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law…three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Isaac Asimov
The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Isaac Asimov
I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

Isaac Asimov
It isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you—and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

Isaac Asimov
The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.

Isaac Asimov
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.

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
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

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
The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.

Isaac Asimov
Nonsense, Weston denied, with an involuntary nervous shiver. That's completely ridiculous. We had a long discussion at the time we bought Robbie about the First Law of Robotics. You know that it is impossible for a robot to harm a human being; that long before enough can go wrong to alter that First Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It's a mathematical impossibility. Besides I have an engineer from U.S. Robots here twice a year to give the poor gadget a complete overhaul. Why, there's no more chance of anything at all going wrong with Robbie than there is of you or I suddenly going looney—considerably less, in fact. Besides, how are you going to take him away from Gloria?

Isaac Asimov