Isaac Asimov Quotes

Biography

Type: Writer, professor of biochemistry

Born: Between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920

Died: April 6, 1992

Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born, American author, a professor of biochemistry, and a highly successful writer, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.

Isaac Asimov Quotes

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

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

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

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

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

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

It's the writing that teaches you.

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

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

The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.

All evil is good become cancerous.

It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.

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

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]

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

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

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

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

Ralph Nimmo carecía de título universitario y se enorgullecía de ello. -Un título [...] es el primer paso de un recorrido calamitoso. Como no quieres desperdiciarlo, pasas al trabajo de graduado y a la investigación doctoral. Terminas por ser un absoluto ignorante de todo, excepto en tu estrechísima especialidad.

Gewalt ist die letzte Zuflucht des Unfähigen.

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

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

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.

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.

Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.

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 a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

Sólo hay una guerra que puede permitirse el ser humano: la guerra contra su extinción.

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

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

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.

I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.

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.

All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.

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

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

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers.

How 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 that war itself?

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.

Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.

I have the shape of a human being and organs equivalent to those of a human being. My organs, in fact, are identical to some of those in a prosthetized human being. I have contributed artistically, literally, and scientifically to human culture as much as any human being now alive. What more can one ask?

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.

And he paused, aware at last of the gathering weight of the silence. Fourteen images stared at him, without any of them offering a word in response.

Bakst said sharply, "You have talked of freedom. You have it!"

Then, uncertainly, he said, "Isn't that what you want?

It has been said in this courtroom that only a human being can be free. It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom.

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 ...

The clown’s eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. “But they kept me away from you earlier-and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship.

Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you.

He’s but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other.

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

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.

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

Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.

Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters.

Share Page

Isaac Asimov Wiki

Isaac Asimov At Amazon