Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom.”

— Isaac Asimov

352. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

354. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

372. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

374. “Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions – not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

379. “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

380. “Consider the question suitably modified.”

— Isaac Asimov

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

389. “But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.′ ‘It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand – at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war.”

— Isaac Asimov

390. “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

391. “There are many people, many worlds who believe in supernaturalism in one form or another... religion, if you like the word better. We may disagree with them in one way or another, but we are as likely to be wrong in our disbelief as they in their belief. In any case, there is no disgrace in such belief and my questions were not intended as insults.”

— Isaac Asimov

392. “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

393. “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

394. “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required.”

— Isaac Asimov

395. “Author’s Notes: This story starts with section 6. This is not a mistake. I have my own subtle reasoning. So, just read, and enjoy.”

— Isaac Asimov

396. “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

397. “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

398. “If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. They make the children come up here once a year, after they’re five. I don’t know if it does any good. They don’t get enough of it, really, and the first few times they scream themselves into hysteria. They ought to start as soon as they’re weaned and have the trip once a week.”

— Isaac Asimov

399. “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. Can you understand that? Can you understand that in averting the pitfalls and miseries that beset man, Eternity prevents men from finding their own bitter and better solutions, the real solutions that come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it?”

— Isaac Asimov

400. “There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.”

— Isaac Asimov