Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Isaac Asimov

202. “It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys.”

— Isaac Asimov

203. “Encyclopedias don’t win wars.”

— Isaac Asimov

204. “Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man’s habits change quickly enough?”

— Isaac Asimov

205. “I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.”

— Isaac Asimov

206. “I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

208. “When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.”

— Isaac Asimov

209. “They don’t want equal time – they want all the time there is.”

— Isaac Asimov

210. “Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all.”

— Isaac Asimov

211. “To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn.”

— Isaac Asimov

212. “Groups, like individuals, will rise to strange heights in answer to a challenge, and vegetate in the absence of a challenge.”

— Isaac Asimov

213. “He never created a finish product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution.”

— Isaac Asimov

214. “We are gaining the knowledge; science is giving us that. Now we need wisdom as well.”

— Isaac Asimov

215. “All they have to do is refuse to believe it means death. The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”

— Isaac Asimov

216. “Scientists expect to be improved on and corrected; they hope to be.”

— Isaac Asimov

217. “But people who are capable of thinking clearly are in a minority, of course.”

— Isaac Asimov

218. “People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.”

— Isaac Asimov

219. “I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing – to be clear.”

— Isaac Asimov

220. “No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth...”

— Isaac Asimov

221. “And as long as it is so believed, Procurator, and as long as we of Earth are treated as pariahs, you are going to find in us the characteristics to which you object.”

— Isaac Asimov

222. “Bible: Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behaviour which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind.”

— Isaac Asimov

223. “When everything impossible had been eliminated and what remains is supernatural, then someone is lying.”

— Isaac Asimov

224. “Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation.”

— Isaac Asimov

225. “Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic.”

— Isaac Asimov

226. “Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.”

— Isaac Asimov

227. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

228. “Where the stars are scattered thinly,′ quoted Barr, ‘And the cold of space seeps in.”

— Isaac Asimov

229. “A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. And you, Lee, have got to worry even if you must kill yourself to invent something to worry about.”

— Isaac Asimov

230. “No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.”

— Isaac Asimov

231. “Love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.”

— Isaac Asimov

232. “Past glories are poor feeding.”

— Isaac Asimov

233. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.”

— Isaac Asimov

234. “Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.”

— Isaac Asimov

235. “His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper- video, and occasionally in tremendous three- dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.”

— Isaac Asimov

236. “Courtiers don’t take wagers against the king’s skill. There is the deadly danger of winning.”

— Isaac Asimov

237. “So it is only the combination of strong Emperor and strong general that can harm the Foundation; for a strong Emperor cannot be dethroned easily, and a strong general is forced to turn outwards, past the frontiers.”

— Isaac Asimov

238. “Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’”

— Isaac Asimov

239. “I do. It’s a mass psychosis, an unprintable mob panic. Ga-LAX-y, Randu, what do you expect? Here you have a whole culture brought up to a blind, blubbering belief that a folk hero of the past has everything all planned out and is taking care of every little piece of their unprintable lives. The thought-pattern evoked has religious characteristics, and you know what that means.”

— Isaac Asimov

240. “The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome.”

— Isaac Asimov

241. “The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate.”

— Isaac Asimov

242. “All evil is good become cancerous.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

244. “There is no merit to discipline under ideal circumstances. I must have it in the face of death or it is worthless.”

— Isaac Asimov

245. “It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”

— Isaac Asimov

246. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

247. “There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.”

— Isaac Asimov

248. “In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”

— Isaac Asimov

249. “If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make?”

— Isaac Asimov

250. “To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.”

— Isaac Asimov