Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “We were never under any delusions as to which was more important, an individual or humanity.”

— Isaac Asimov

452. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

453. “He who is needed must learn to endure flattery.”

— Isaac Asimov

454. “Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another – sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself – while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off.”

— Isaac Asimov

455. “Now a human caught in an impossibility often responds by a retreat from reality: by entry into a world of delusion, or by taking to drink, going of into hysteria, or jumping off a bridge. It all comes to the same thing-a refusal or inability to face the situation squarely.”

— Isaac Asimov

456. “Perhaps! Your opinions are yours, of course. Still you are rather young.” Dryly. “It is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life. You became mayor of the city when you were two years younger than I am now.”

— Isaac Asimov

457. “He didn’t believe that, surely.” “Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being insulted would only lead to humiliation. And since he didn’t want that, the simplest path to follow was to believe what I said.”

— Isaac Asimov

458. “You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.”

— Isaac Asimov

459. “Let us assume you’ve made your point.”

— Isaac Asimov

460. “For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it.”

— Isaac Asimov

461. “Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people.”

— Isaac Asimov

462. “Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one.”

— Isaac Asimov

463. “Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

— Isaac Asimov

464. “And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism.”

— Isaac Asimov

465. “There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatable with the greater, the lesser must give way.”

— Isaac Asimov

466. “Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs – the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah – balance the disagweements – analyze the conflicting statements – decide which is pwobably cowwect – and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least” – patronizingly – “as I see it.”

— Isaac Asimov

467. “The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting.”

— Isaac Asimov

468. “With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.”

— Isaac Asimov

469. “Of course, the reader might argue that I was as stubborn in my viewpoint as they were in theirs. Yes, indeed, but I was right and they were wrong and that made the difference.”

— Isaac Asimov

470. “Even as though dearest with th en humble and defenseless, thus shalt though be dealt with.”

— Isaac Asimov

471. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

472. “An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.”

— Isaac Asimov

473. “That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.”

— Isaac Asimov

474. “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.”

— Isaac Asimov

475. “It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. He was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.”

— Isaac Asimov

476. “The Scientist – with capital letters and no smile.”

— Isaac Asimov

477. “They are useful, but they are too strong – and too uncontrolled. They are Outlanders, educated apart from religion. On the one hand, we put knowledge into their hands, and on the other, we remove our strongest hold upon them.”

— Isaac Asimov

478. “Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a smattering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight.”

— Isaac Asimov

479. “When one’s home has a really excellent computer capable of reaching other computers anywhere in the Galaxy, one scarcely needs to budge, you know.”

— Isaac Asimov

480. “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

481. “When one begins by expressing lack of competence in a given field, it usually implies that a flat opinion in that field will follow almost immediately.”

— Isaac Asimov

482. “We can’t give up just because the Universe does.”

— Isaac Asimov

483. “Battling a sickness of the spirit was like standing in a quickstand and beating it with a stick.”

— Isaac Asimov

484. “Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home.”

— Isaac Asimov

485. “I like you two. You’re inferior creatures, with poor reasoning faculties, but I really feel a sort of affection for you. You have served the Master well, and he will reward you for that. Now that your service is over, you will probably not exist much longer, but as long as you do, you shall be provided food, clothing and shelter, so long as you stay out of the control room and the engine room.”

— Isaac Asimov

486. “Don’t you think my interest can be real, even granted that it is professional, too?” “No, I don’t.”

— Isaac Asimov

487. “To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire. Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.”

— Isaac Asimov

488. “His honor, rests in the very actions that led to his conviction and death. It is beyond your power to add to or detract from it.”

— Isaac Asimov

489. “They work off all their resentments, enjoy all the smug self-satisfaction a young revolutionary would have, and by the time they take their place in the Imperial hierarchy, they are ready to settle down into conformity and obedience.”

— Isaac Asimov

490. “Their whole training has been authoritarian. They are sure that the Emperor, just because he is the Emperor, is all-powerful. And they are sure that the Board of Trustees, simply because it is the Board of Trustees acting in the name of the Emperor, cannot be in a position where it does not give the orders.”

— Isaac Asimov

491. “Since I do not believe in so many things, it is not difficult for me to disbelieve in the Fall as well, so that I am entirely convinced I will be telling the truth to the people.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

493. “Some day, with all that the Cities could do, the available calories per person would simply fall below basic subsistence level.”

— Isaac Asimov

494. “He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man.”

— Isaac Asimov

495. “Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.”

— Isaac Asimov

496. “Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing.”

— Isaac Asimov

497. “He clearly knew how dangerous it was to have an excited twelve-year-old handling a powerful weapon.”

— Isaac Asimov

498. “Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.”

— Isaac Asimov

499. “Dors muttered to him, “Stop studying humanity. Be aware of your surroundings.” “I’ll try.”

— Isaac Asimov

500. “And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end.”

— Isaac Asimov