Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

304. “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

305. “The machines do not solve problems with greater insight than men do, only faster. Only faster!”

— Isaac Asimov

306. “Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.”

— Isaac Asimov

307. “It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills.”

— Isaac Asimov

308. “There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.”

— Isaac Asimov

309. “Why is it, I wonder, that anyone who displays superior athletic ability is an object of admiration to his classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of hatred?”

— Isaac Asimov

310. “Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.”

— Isaac Asimov

311. “There’s so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.”

— Isaac Asimov

312. “No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate – like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history – until it degenerates into fables.”

— Isaac Asimov

313. “What kind of a ridiculous animal are we to be lords of the world after the dinosaurs had failed? Sure, we’re intelligent, but what’s intelligence? We think it is important because we have it. If the Tyrannosaurus could have picked out the one quality that he thought would ensure species domination, it would be size and strength. And he would make a better case for it. He lasted longer than we’re likely to.”

— Isaac Asimov

314. “You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can’t always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you’ve planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.”

— Isaac Asimov

315. “During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.”

— Isaac Asimov

316. “Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.”

— Isaac Asimov

317. “If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.”

— Isaac Asimov

318. “The downtrodden are more religious than the satisfied.”

— Isaac Asimov

319. “Custom is second nature. Be accustomed to a bald head, sufficiently accustomed, and hair on it would seem monstrous.”

— Isaac Asimov

320. “Space, man, have you no respect for science?”

— Isaac Asimov

321. “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

— Isaac Asimov

322. “When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”

— Isaac Asimov

323. “Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.’ I’m no god and I’ll contend no longer.”

— Isaac Asimov

324. “The word “robot” is from a Czech word meaning “compulsory labor.”

— Isaac Asimov

325. “While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream.”

— Isaac Asimov

326. “For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?”

— Isaac Asimov

327. “Suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?”

— Isaac Asimov

328. “Tens of millions of Americans who neither know or understand the actual arguments for, or even against, evolution, march in the Army of the Night with their Bibles held high.”

— Isaac Asimov

329. “To Mankind And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won after all.”

— Isaac Asimov

330. “It’s just that old people always think young people haven’t really learned about love; and young people think that old people have forgotten about love; and, you know, they’re both wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov

331. “What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.”

— Isaac Asimov

332. “There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural.”

— Isaac Asimov

333. “All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.”

— Isaac Asimov

334. “Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.”

— Isaac Asimov

335. “You’ll have such proof as exists. You are the only one responsible for your own wants.”

— Isaac Asimov

336. “There’s no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war.”

— Isaac Asimov

337. “Arthur Clarke says that I am first in science and second in science fiction in accordance with an agreement we have made. I say he is first in science fiction and second in science.”

— Isaac Asimov

338. “There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.”

— Isaac Asimov

339. “There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain.”

— Isaac Asimov

340. “It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests.”

— Isaac Asimov

341. “All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.”

— Isaac Asimov

342. “I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.”

— Isaac Asimov

343. “Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless – or even actually harmful.”

— Isaac Asimov

344. “Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.”

— Isaac Asimov

345. “That’s the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that’s what just science fiction is.”

— Isaac Asimov

346. “Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict – its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself – what’s the expression – ah, yes, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper,’ as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.”

— Isaac Asimov

347. “The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.”

— Isaac Asimov

348. “John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.”

— Isaac Asimov

349. “The spell of power never quite releases its hold.”

— Isaac Asimov

350. “There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream.”

— Isaac Asimov