Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

206. “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

207. “You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason – if you pick the proper postulates.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

210. “Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”

— Isaac Asimov

211. “Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.”

— Isaac Asimov

212. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

213. “Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

215. “The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books – so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.”

— Isaac Asimov

216. “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.”

— Isaac Asimov

217. “It’s not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it’s what you have to UNlearn.”

— Isaac Asimov

218. “Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.”

— Isaac Asimov

219. “The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life.”

— Isaac Asimov

220. “A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve.”

— Isaac Asimov

221. “It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.”

— Isaac Asimov

222. “What would I do if I knew I only had six months to live? Type faster.”

— Isaac Asimov

223. “Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.”

— Isaac Asimov

224. “The cure for advanced gullibility is to go to sleep and consider matters again the next day.”

— Isaac Asimov

225. “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

226. “Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.”

— Isaac Asimov

227. “How many people is the earth able to sustain?”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

229. “Encyclopedias don’t win wars.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

231. “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

232. “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

233. “The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.”

— Isaac Asimov

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

238. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

244. “A human being born at one of Uranus’s poles would be a middle-aged man at sunset and a very old man before it was time for a second sunrise.”

— Isaac Asimov

245. “They want to be treated as equals, they say, and so they do, but, given a chance, they have no desire to treat others as equals.”

— Isaac Asimov

246. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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