Isaac Asimov - Science Quotes

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Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov
Beginning students of chemistry often think of the science as a mere collection of disconnected data to be memorized by brute force. Not at all! Just look at it properly and everything hangs together and makes sense. Of course, getting the hang of the proper look isn't always easy.

Isaac Asimov
Science is a process. It is a way of thinking, a manner of approaching and of possibly resolving problems, a route by which one can produce order and sense out of disorganized and chaotic observations. Through it we achieve useful conclusions and results that are compelling and upon which there is a tendency to agree.

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

Isaac Asimov
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.

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
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
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
Science will not stand still. It is a panorama that subtly dissolves and changes even while we watch. It cannot be caught in its every detail at any one moment of time without leaving us behind at once.

Isaac Asimov
Science must not be viewed as a mysterious black box out of which came toys and goodies, for that way laymen would view scientists as a kind of lab-coated priesthood — and, eventually, fear and hate them.

Isaac Asimov
The process of science... involves a slow forward movement through the reachable portions of the Universe — a gradual unfolding of parts of the mystery.

Isaac Asimov
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

Isaac Asimov
It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.

Isaac Asimov
How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Isaac Asimov
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

Isaac Asimov
For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

Isaac Asimov
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

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
Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.

Isaac Asimov
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov