Isaac Asimov Quotations

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

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

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

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 every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.

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 has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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.

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

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

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

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?

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.

All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.

While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream.

People think of education as something they can finish.

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?

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing.

In life, people will take you at your own reckoning.

I have written 240 books on a wide variety of topics. . . . Some of it I based on education I received in my school, but most of it was backed by other ways of learning - chiefly in the books I obtained in the public library.

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.

He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

Congratulations on the new library, because 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.

...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.

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

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

Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise-even in their own field.

Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.

All evil is good become cancerous.

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 that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

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.

Increasingly, our leaders must deal with dangers that threaten the entire world, where an understanding of those dangers and the possible solutions depends on a good grasp of science. The ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, questions of diet and heredity. All require scientific literacy. Can Americans choose the proper leaders and support the proper programs if they themselves are scientifically illiterate? The whole premise of democracy is that it is safe to leave important questions to the court of public opinion-but is it safe to leave them to the court of public ignorance?

A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

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.

Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself---what's the expression---ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.

The energy requirements for interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades. If they want to make contact, they would make contact; if not, they would save their energy and go elsewhere.

Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.

I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

The great secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all

The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know-and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know-even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction-than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

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

You don't have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten.

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.