Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment.” “Surely,” said Pelorat, “such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don’t think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

257. “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

258. “Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

260. “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

261. “All evil is good become cancerous.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

263. “Logical but not reasonable. Wasn’t that the definition of a robot?”

— Isaac Asimov

264. “It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus.”

— Isaac Asimov

265. “All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on “calculating machines” had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She.”

— Isaac Asimov

266. “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

267. “Fertility is hereditary. If your parents didn’t have any children, neither will you. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

— Isaac Asimov

268. “We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood.”

— Isaac Asimov

269. “Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.”

— Isaac Asimov

270. “It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.”

— Isaac Asimov

271. “To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable.”

— Isaac Asimov

272. “Here in the Periphery they’ve lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they’re to restrict nuclear power.” And for the third time: “Don’t you see? It’s Galaxy-wide. It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration – a stagnation!”

— Isaac Asimov

273. “Baley said, sharply, “Nevertheless bound by friendship. Do not, for your own sake, test the force of our – ” Now it was he who paused and, as though to his own surprise, completed the sentence impossibly, “ – love.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

275. “Actions such as his could come only from a robot, or from a very honorable and decent human being. But you see, you can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”

— Isaac Asimov

276. “The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.”

— Isaac Asimov

277. “Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.”

— Isaac Asimov

278. “It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial.”

— Isaac Asimov

279. “A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.”

— Isaac Asimov

280. “I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: ‘Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.’”

— Isaac Asimov

281. “Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.”

— Isaac Asimov

282. “A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics.”

— Isaac Asimov

283. “There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. “We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men.”

— Isaac Asimov

284. “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.”

— Isaac Asimov

285. “Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.”

— Isaac Asimov

286. “The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov

287. “Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.”

— Isaac Asimov

288. “Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line – even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.”

— Isaac Asimov

289. “The government doesn’t want any system of transmitting information to remain unbroken, unless it’s under its own control.”

— Isaac Asimov

290. “Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.”

— Isaac Asimov

291. “Computerization eliminates the middleman.”

— Isaac Asimov

292. “Life is not like a murder mystery. In mysteries people always do the same thing. Then when some little thing is out of line, some wise-guy amateur detective makes big deductions. In real life, people don’t do the same things all the time. They do different things at different times. In real life, people are crazy.”

— Isaac Asimov

293. “This game the Persian Magi did invent, The force of Eastern wisdom to express: From thence to busy Europeans sent, And styled by modern Lombards pensive chess.”

— Isaac Asimov

294. “I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing – I went into politics. It’s practically the same thing.”

— Isaac Asimov

295. “A man without weaknesses serves only to make everyone else conscious of his own imperfections.”

— Isaac Asimov

296. “All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You’d be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.”

— Isaac Asimov

297. “It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind.”

— Isaac Asimov

298. “Boasts are wind and deeds are hard.”

— Isaac Asimov

299. “If nuclear power makes them dangerous, a sincere friendship through trade will be many times better than an insecure overlordship, based on the hated supremacy of a foreign spiritual power, which, once it weakens ever so slightly, can only fall entirely and leave nothing substantial behind except an immortal fear and hate.”

— Isaac Asimov

300. “Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds.”

— Isaac Asimov