“People think of education as something they can finish.”
— Isaac Asimov
“However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference – but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.”
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but ‘That’s funny...’”
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”
“All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.”
“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”
“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
“It’s the writing that teaches you.”
“Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.”
“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.”
“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.”
“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”
“Any planet is ‘Earth’ to those that live on it.”
“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”
“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”
“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.”
“The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.”
“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.”
“The intelligent man is never bored.”
“Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task – such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping – I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.”
“There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
“It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.”
“Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”
“The law of conservation of energy tells us we can’t get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.”
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
“There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.”
“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 a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence.”
“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”
“A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.”
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
“The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.”
“Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.”
“Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.”
“They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.”
“Economics is on the side of humanity now.”
“The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.”
“If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Life is a journey, but don’t worry, you’ll find a parking spot at the end.”
“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”
“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”
“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.”
“The great secret of the successful fool is that he’s no fool at all.”
“The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity.”
“Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.”
“Never judge your own writing. You’re not fit to do so.”
“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.”
“And in man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.”
“My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.”
“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.”
“We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them.”
“To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.”
“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 roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.”
“It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.”
“The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it’s bad for you.”
“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.”
“Working ten hour days allows you to fall behind twice as fast as you could working five hour days.”
“Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.”
“It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.”
“The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.”
“I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don’t have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.”
“Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”
“There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?”
“What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind’s habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.”
“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
“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?”
“The dangers that face the world can, every one of them, be traced back to science. The salvations that may save the world will, every one of them, be traced back to science.”
“Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.”
“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”
“I don’t like anything that’s got to be. I want to know why.”
“Man’s greatest asset is the unsettled mind.”
“A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.”
“I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
“Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.”
“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.”
“The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”
“It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.”
“In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process.”
“Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.”
“Life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew.”
“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.”
“Before another century is done it will be hard for people to imagine a time when humanity was confined to one world, and it will seem to them incredible that there was ever anybody who doubted the value of space and wanted to turn his or her back on the Universe.”
“Naturally, there’s got to be a limit for I don’t expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.”
“Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them.”
“The false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
“Society is much more easily soothed than one’s own conscience.”
“You don’t have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten.”
“You can’t assert an answer just because it’s not something else.”
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