Isaac Asimov - I, Robot (1950)

18 Sourced Quotes

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

Isaac Asimov
Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

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

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
There's nothing like deduction. We've determined everything about our problem but the solution.

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
Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.

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
You're the U. S. Robot's psychologist, aren't you?
Robopsychologist, please.
Oh, are robots so different from men, mentally?
Worlds different. She allowed herself a frosty smile, Robots are essentially decent.

Isaac Asimov
There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

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
I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless.

Isaac Asimov
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

Isaac Asimov
Just you think first, and don't bother to speak afterward, either.

Isaac Asimov
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.

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