Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I’m writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.”

— Isaac Asimov

352. “Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand.”

— Isaac Asimov

353. “It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom.”

— Isaac Asimov

354. “A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

356. “You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?”

— Isaac Asimov

357. “It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!”

— Isaac Asimov

358. “In fact, it was part of the Tyrannian military tradition that a little discomfort on the part of the soldier was good for discipline.”

— Isaac Asimov

359. “An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched.”

— Isaac Asimov

360. “Supongo que no hay manera de hacer regresar la nube con forma de hongo a esa bonita y reluciente esfera de uranio.”

— Isaac Asimov

361. “After all, all devices have their dangers. The discovery of speech introduced communication – and lies. The discovery of fire introduced cooking – and arson. The discovery of the compass improved navigation – and destroyed civilizations in Mexico and Peru. The automobile is marvelously useful – and kills Americans by the tens of thousands each year. Medical advances have saved lives by the millions – and intensified the population explosion.”

— Isaac Asimov

362. “Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That’s how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.”

— Isaac Asimov

363. “The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end. With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they would have crushed us. It is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds.”

— Isaac Asimov

364. “Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.”

— Isaac Asimov

365. “Well, there is one – a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man whom they call the Mule.” “The Mule?” She considered. “Ever hear of him, Torie?”

— Isaac Asimov

366. “But what could I want with riches? The true wealth is the love of one’s people.”

— Isaac Asimov

367. “I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.”

— Isaac Asimov

368. “So far, scientists have not uncovered any evidence that would hint that the workings of the Universe require the action of a divine being. On the other hand, scientists have uncovered no evidence that indicates that a divine being does not exist.”

— Isaac Asimov

369. “The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.”

— Isaac Asimov

370. “One way of saving on energy use would be to do away with unnecessary transportation. For instance, people commute between work and home, or travel long distances to engage in business conferences. With the development of improved communications and increasing automation, it will become possible in the not-too-distant future, for people to control and maintain business operations and machinery at a distance.”

— Isaac Asimov

371. “When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion – the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.”

— Isaac Asimov

372. “The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.”

— Isaac Asimov

373. “People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.”

— Isaac Asimov

374. “People say ‘It’s as plain as the noise on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone hold a mirror up to you?”

— Isaac Asimov

375. “He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.”

— Isaac Asimov

376. “A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.”

— Isaac Asimov

377. “Only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.”

— Isaac Asimov

378. “They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we’re on our way.”

— Isaac Asimov

379. “Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.”

— Isaac Asimov

380. “And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool production of 12,000 years of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate in mathematics freshly obtained and an invitation from the great Hari Seldon to come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat mysterious Seldon Project. What.”

— Isaac Asimov

381. “No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.”

— Isaac Asimov

382. “Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn’t get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn’t be any native inhabitants. You couldn’t expect life – which is fundamentally dependent on light – to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.”

— Isaac Asimov

383. “Consider the question suitably modified.”

— Isaac Asimov

384. “The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It’s the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect – but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.”

— Isaac Asimov

385. “Now tell me what happened – in words. I want your translation of the mathematics.”

— Isaac Asimov

386. “One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.”

— Isaac Asimov

387. “If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.”

— Isaac Asimov

388. “I have never written a book that didn’t teach me far more than it taught my reader.”

— Isaac Asimov

389. “Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.”

— Isaac Asimov

390. “A happy wall is a long-lived wall, a practical wall, a useful wall.”

— Isaac Asimov

391. “The world is being Americanized and technologized to its limits, and that makes it dull for some people. Reaching the Moon restores the frontier and gives us the lands beyond.”

— Isaac Asimov

392. “Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.”

— Isaac Asimov

393. “I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.”

— Isaac Asimov

394. “It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.”

— Isaac Asimov

395. “To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing.”

— Isaac Asimov

396. “They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.”

— Isaac Asimov

397. “A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being’s ultimate good after all.”

— Isaac Asimov

398. “It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?”

— Isaac Asimov

399. “It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration – a stagnation!”

— Isaac Asimov

400. “They were scientists enough to admit that they were wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov