Isaac Asimov - Man Quotes

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Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.

Isaac Asimov
Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

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
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
How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

Isaac Asimov
As we trace the development of man over the ages, it seems in many respects a tale of glory and victory; of the development of the brain; of the discovery of fire, of the building of cities and of civilization; of the triumph of reason; of the filling of the Earth and the reaching out to sea and space.

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
We must remember that measures were made for man and not man for measures.

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
There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state. -(from "The Bicentennial Man) story)

Isaac Asimov
There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.

Isaac Asimov
Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me, he said, then I would say this lady can not exist — for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.

Isaac Asimov
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

Isaac Asimov
Give us but the chance and a new generation of Earthmen would grow to maturity, lacking insularity and believing wholeheartedly in the oneness of Man.

Isaac Asimov
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.

Isaac Asimov
Miniaturization doesn't actually make sense unless you miniaturize the very atoms of which matter is composed. Otherwise a tiny brain in a man the size of an insect, composed of normal atoms, is composed of too few atoms for the miniaturized man to be any more intelligent than the ant. Also, miniaturizing atoms is impossible according to the rules of quantum mechanics.

Isaac Asimov
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.

Isaac Asimov
The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.

Isaac Asimov