Isaac Asimov - Time Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

View all Isaac Asimov Quotes
All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

Isaac Asimov
I'm saying suppose. In mathematics, we say "suppose" all the time and see if we can end up with something patently untrue or self-contradictory.

Isaac Asimov
Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?

Isaac Asimov
Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

Isaac Asimov
Scientific theories have a tendency to fit the intellectual fashions of the time.

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
It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

Isaac Asimov
At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past.

Isaac Asimov
The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.

Isaac Asimov
Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984, by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.

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
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
He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

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 last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way…

Isaac Asimov
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

Isaac Asimov
Fifty years, I hackneyed, is a long time.
Not when you're looking back at them, she said. You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

Isaac Asimov
Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked in school.

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
That was the time to begin all-out preparations for war.
On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war.

Isaac Asimov